


The Auror and the Ghost

by Etalice



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Aurors, But in an artistic way, Case Fic, Draco's dead, Dreams, Feminism, Happy Ending, I hope, I promise the ending is happy, Illegal Potions, M/M, Magical Realism, POV First Person, POV Third Person, Really quite a mess with POVs, only not really, please trust me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2020-06-11 04:27:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19526086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etalice/pseuds/Etalice
Summary: The whole mess starts with Pansy Parkinson because of course, it does.She stumbles into my office on a Tuesday morning, all perfect makeup and sleek shiny hair, her stiletto heels striking the flagstone floor in sharp, short, deafening taps.“I’ve been drugged,” she declares, standing in front of my desk with her arms crossed and her manicured fingers pressed tight on to the baby-blue cashmere of her sweater.When Pansy stumbles into Harry's office, Harry uncovers the existence of an illegal potion ring that caters to pureblooded men whose daughters are either too ambitious or too gay to get married and give them grandchildren. And then, there's the small matter of the dreams he keeps having ever since he's had the excellent idea of drinking an unknown potion in a suspect shop, dreams in which Draco keeps showing up and talking to him. The only problem is: Draco's been dead for two years, and Harry isn't coping well with any of it.





	1. Pansy Parkinson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Vany for her beta work. My undying gratitude to [Spooky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookywoods/pseuds/spookywoods) for her invaluable advice, her input, and for organising the summer workshops.

The whole mess starts with Pansy Parkinson because of course, it does.

She stumbles into my office on a Tuesday morning, all perfect makeup and sleek shiny hair, her stiletto heels striking the flagstone floor in sharp, short, deafening taps.

“I’ve been drugged,” she declares, standing in front of my desk with her arms crossed and her manicured fingers pressed tight on to the baby-blue cashmere of her sweater.

She doesn’t say anything else—not hello, or how are you, or I need your help. She doesn’t request a chair or follow up that statement with anything at all. She just says she’s been drugged as the words have been sitting like knives upon her tongue for days and waits.

I gesture towards a chair, she pulls it up and sets her handbag on her lap, smoothing the grey wool of her skirt with her left hand. She still doesn’t say a word. I feel her chestnut eyes trying to bore a hole at the base of my throat.

“Can you tell me why you think that?” I ask, shuffling the case files on my desk in search of a quill.

Up close, I can see the details she’s trying to hide behind her put-together facade—the sharp eyeliner highlights a redness in her eyes that belies too little sleep and too many tears; her hands are flat against the houndstooth fabric of her skirt, pressing just a little too hard onto her thighs, the finger joints just a little too white. Everything about her form is just a little too tense, the shoulders just a little too square underneath the soft pastel knit, her chin just a little too jutted. Whatever it is she thinks happened, she’s not coping very well at all.

“Auror Potter.” She takes a sharp breath in. “I have known I was a lesbian ever since I was thirteen and kissed Millicent on a dare. I have never as much as liked a man for a single second in my entire life. Yet, today, I woke up in the middle of my engagement party to Miles Bletchley.” She says the name like she’s spitting out a slug. For an instant, I think she’s going to start crying. She doesn’t. (She presses her lips tightly together instead.)

“You say you woke up,” I ask. “Can you tell me what you mean by that?”

“I can’t really explain in a way that doesn’t make me sound crazy.” She pauses and laughs, dry and hollow. It sounds like nerves and exhaustion. “And Merlin forbid I sound crazy in front of an Auror, lest he dismisses my case entirely.”

She pauses. Hesitates.

“Look, Potter, do you remember Draco’s funeral?”

I try not to wince at that. I try not to tell her that there are days when Draco’s funeral is all that I can think about. I try not to show that Draco’s death is still etched into every single one of my bones, a terrible sort of tattoo made entirely out of pain and loss. 

(I fail.)

I nod all the same.

“Do you remember who I was with, Potter?”

She doesn’t let me answer, which is a good thing because I don’t want to remember anything about that awful day at all.

(I remember everything: the way the air stuck to my lungs like tar, and the way rain fell straight through my skin and pooled inside my chest, and the way the darkness behind my eyes swallowed the sun until the colours bled out of everything.)

“I was with Luna. We’d been dating for three months when Draco died. She saw me at my worst, Potter—she saw the days I started crying in the wee hours of the morning and didn’t stop until I fell asleep. She was there when I couldn’t get out of bed, and when I didn’t shower for a week, and when I spent hours under scalding water, rubbing at my skin, hoping I could wash the grief away like mud. She held my hand through everything, and she never once told me I was too much. If there’s one thing I can tell you, it is that I decided I’d marry her that day. Right there and then under the pouring rain, I vowed to myself I’d spend the rest of my life with this wonderful woman if she’d have me.”

Pansy’s eyes are bright with tears when she stops speaking. She reaches over my desk and covers my hand with her delicate fingers. Her skin is cold and smooth on mine, and I look up from the notes I wasn’t taking anyway. 

“I don’t even remember leaving her,” Pansy whispers with shiny, round tears rolling down her cheeks, “I loved her so much, and I don’t even remember leaving her, and when I woke up I was going to marry that idiot Bletchley.”

“Do you have any recollection at all of anything prior to that engagement party?” The question is awkward, of course, if only because my voice sounds deafeningly loud in the wake of her pained whisper, but I figure it is the best way to help her stop crying. Pansy’s never liked having people pity her, and I can’t quite bring myself to entertain the emotion anyway.

“I don’t… I don’t and I do at the same time... I remember some of it...” Pansy withdraws her hand from mine and buries her fingers between her knees in a nervous motion. “Have you ever had those dreams that you can’t remember entirely? Like there are entire chunks missing from the story, and it’s right there at the edge of your brain but you can’t seem to ever remember them? That’s how I feel about the last two years.”

“Can you talk me through what you remember?” I ask because her story resonates strangely inside my chest; because every single one of her words awakes something behind my ribs, something terrible and ancient that I didn’t even know was there before it started to stir, and I need to know more.

“I remember Draco’s funeral. I remember coming home with Luna afterwards and I remember two weeks after that, maybe three. I asked Luna to move in with me, and she said yes, and I remember it was the first time I thought maybe I was going to be alright.”

Pansy pauses for an instant and rubs at her cheeks with her hand, smudging the wet traces of her carefully applied makeup. She doesn’t notice, and I don’t tell her.

“I remember going to my parents’ for Sunday dinner. Then, my memories start to fade. I remember my parents’ Equinox ball last summer, Miles had a hand over my shoulders and it was the happiest I have ever felt. I remember shopping inon Diagon Alley—a new dress I think, an awful mess of light pink chiffon I would never normally wear. I remember thinking it was wonderful. I remember the smell of roses in Parkinson Manor Park, and I remember thinking Miles was going to propose. I remember bits and pieces, in no particular order, like puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. And I hate it, Potter. I hate it. I hate not having my memories. I hate that there is a hole in my mind where the last two years should be.”

The anger in her voice sets fire to the terrible, ancient things in my chest. I look down at my quill. I haven’t taken a single note since she started talking about Draco’s funeral. I write _memory loss_ and I ask:

“And if you have, indeed, been drugged, Miss Parkinson, can you think of anyone who could have done it?”

“My father.” Her reply is sharp and stinging like a whip. I write it down too and add a question mark.

“I have no proof, of course,” she continues in a poison-laced voice, “But two years ago, I had a flat and a girlfriend I loved more than anything on earth, and now, I have none of these things. Instead, I have a bedroom at the Manor and am apparently living in bliss at the idea that I am going to marry an absolute cretin—and I promise you, Auror Potter, I would never have agreed to either of these things of my own free will.”

She rummages through her small handbag (smooth charcoal leather, posh and expensive) until she finds a torn piece of paper that she sets on the desk and pushes towards me.

“One thing I remember is that Father received regular owls from this apothecary. It didn’t strike me as strange at the time, but then again I was being courted by a man and didn’t think it was strange either. It’s not his regular apothecary, though, and I’ve never heard the name before. He still buys his headache potions from the same place he always did, so it’s not that he’s changed shops. It’s not much to go on, and it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s the best I can give you.”

I pick up the receipt: Hawthorne’s Apothecary is written on top in a curly script. Underneath, an amount of galleons is penned in ink. No mention of what the galleons have been exchanged for. I turn it between my fingers for a while, then I spell it attached onto the pitiful notes I’d taken. I look at her and her face is equal parts anger and loss, confusion and resignation. I can’t think of any more questions to ask.

I end up promising Pansy that I’ll look into that apothecary if nothing else. I know I shouldn’t because new cases should be run by my boss, but thinking about Draco’s death has never caused me to make a single good decision in my life so I tell her I’ll see what I can do. She stands up brisk and businesslike, wiping the smudged traces of wet mascara from her cheeks, and she shakes my hand.

“I know you pushed for Draco’s murder to be investigated,” she adds, squeezing my hand, “and I know what it cost you. Just do what you can, Potter. I trust you.”

And then, she’s out of the door, the sound of her heels the only reminder she’d ever been here. I collapse into my chair and don’t move for the rest of the day.

* * *

I visit Hawthorne’s Apothecary the very next day. 

I shouldn’t, of course. I should wait a few days, I should clear my head, talk it over with Ron. I should do a whole lot of things that I don’t feel like doing at all, so I don’t do any of them. I just leave my office on my lunch break and walk through the streets of London.

I pretend I don’t know where I’m going. I pretend that a bit of air will do me good. To tell the truth, all the talk of Malfoy’s funeral affects me more than I expected. That’s saying quite a lot, really, since Malfoy’s death has been hanging over my head for the past two years. It’s not even that we were friends, Malfoy and I, not strictly speaking. We were—friendlier. After the war. We spoke to each other when we met at Ministry functions, swapped a couple of awkward platitudes here and there. He used to work as a potion expert for the Aurors, I’d bring him samples to test every now and then, and I’d wish him a good day. It makes no sense that I’d miss him so much, and I know Ron and Hermione think I’m somehow using his death as a shorthand to talk about all the others—Sirius and my parents, Fred and Remus and Tonks. It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s not entirely right either.

Hawthorne’s Apothecary ends up being a tiny shop in Horizont Alley. It looks respectable enough, from the outside. Although it doesn’t have any windows, the grey-green wood door has been left slightly ajar; it boasts a small wooden sign upon which the name of the shop is written in the same curly script I had noticed on the receipt Pansy gave me. I sneak a glance at the inside of the shop through the glass panelling of the door: it seems empty. Before I can second-guess coming here at all, I push the door and walk in.

The inside of the shop is surprisingly bright, given the lack of windows. I suspect someone with an expert hand at interior design charms has had a hand in that at some point. Other than that, the shop is entirely unremarkable. The hardwood floors are tarnished with time, and pine shelves full of boxes and bottles and jars stretch from floor to ceiling on every wall. I recognise raw ingredients—nothing rare, things like asphodel and dittany, things I remember using in potions class at Hogwarts.

“Can I help you?”

The voice is deep and male. The question startles me. I turn around. Behind the counter, the wizard repeats:

“Sir? Can I help you?”

I walk towards him, not entirely certain what to tell him when he saves me the trouble by recognising me.

“Harry? Harry Potter? I don’t think we’ve seen each other since we left Hogwarts!” He extends his hand towards me, a wide smile spreading across his face. I have no idea who he is.

“You remember me, right? Aaron Woodbridge? Used to play chaser for Ravenclaw when you were in Second Year?”

“Yeah,” I say because I absolutely don’t, and give his hand a firm shake, “I can’t say I expected to find you here! Is this your shop?”

“It is indeed!” He beams with pride. “It’s not as big as I’d like, not yet, but I can sell you some of the finest potions in London! Are you looking for something in particular?”

“I am, actually,” I lie, and it is my first mistake. “I can feel a terrible headache coming on and I really can’t afford to take the time off this afternoon.”

“You have come to the right place, Harry. Come, come, let us go at the back of the shop and I will put together a potion especially for you.”

I follow him behind the counter through a heavy plum curtain and to a cluttered table in a tiny room full of books and paper.

“What would you say your headaches are like, usually? Stabbing? Pounding?” He searches through the shelves on the wall until he finds a book and thumbs the pages as he waits for my answer.

“Pounding?” I say because I figure I have to say something and that’s as good as anything else, really.

“Pounding,” he repeats as he finds the right page and sets the book down on the table. He busies himself with clearing the table to make space for a small silver cauldron; I crane my neck and try to make out the contents of the book. It is some sort of potion recipe. I don’t know what I expected.

We make small talk as he works. I learn he doesn’t have any children although he would want some in the future and that he dedicates all his free time to this shop until he can find a suitable girl to marry and settle down. I hum a vague sort of agreement. For all his commitment to his business, I can’t help but feel slightly ill at ease. It’s not something that I can pinpoint exactly, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to settle down, but he’s using turns of phrases that remind me of how people used to talk before the war and it’s apparently enough to make me feel faintly sick. I tell myself that it’s perhaps just that I am not yet at the point in my life where I can imagine a future that isn’t just another version of the present.

“Tell me how you found my shop again?” He asks, grinding up the thick leaves of some sort of succulent plant into a paste. “Not that many people manage to find it by chance, especially since I can’t afford to have a proper storefront yet”

“Miles,” I blurt out, and this is my second mistake. “Miles Bletchley. We’re… Um. Friends.”

I am a terrible liar. Aaron adds a crimson powder into his cauldron, carefully stirring it in with slow clockwise motions. I feel the mood in the room shift.

“This part requires some concentration,” he warns me as the contents of his cauldron turn bright turmeric yellow. I tell myself his change in demeanour is entirely explained by the apparent difficulty of this step in the brewing process and watch him in silence. 

I try not to think of how distraught Pansy was yesterday because I can’t entirely bring myself to believe this man, however disagreeable I may find him, is the type to be running an illicit potion trade, which means I have no lead on her case. 

I also try not to think of the particular way Draco used to stand hunched over cauldrons in his lab at the ministry when I visited him. 

(I fail on both counts.)

“There you go, Harry,” he finally says, pouring the brightly coloured potion into a cup. “The finest headache potion you will find anywhere in London if I do say so myself.”

He hands me the cup. I hesitate. I wasn’t expecting him to want me to drink anything right there and then.

“It’ll be about twenty minutes before you can feel the effect, you really want to take it at once.” He smiles as one would smile at a scared dog or a fussy child, reassuring and patronising. I take the cup from his fingers. And then, because I can’t think of any excuses, I make my third mistake:

I drink the potion.

As the world fades to black around me, Aaron’s smile is the last thing I see, and it makes me want to be sick.


	2. Draco Malfoy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the chapter that earns this fic the tag "Quite a mess with POVs really" but I think it's also where things start to get interesting. I hope it'll work for you.
> 
> Edit: [Andithiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andithiel/) is the loveliest and she took the time to point out a few mistakes that I had left in this chapter. All remaining typos are strictly my own.

Harry’s lying on the ground when he opens his eyes again, the rich-dark earth painting stripes of wet where it comes into contact with the soft naked skin of his hands and wrists and neck. Around him, the purple-fragrant blooms of lavender sway softly in the still, heavy air, caressing his face with their powerful, soothing scent.

He stands up, slowly. Everything is a soft watercolour of muted pastels; lavender fields stretch as far as the eye can see. Calm spills into Harry’s veins like grey-blue ink, soothing and cooling until he feels entirely at peace; time and geography have no currency here. Harry takes off his shoes, lets the soft, vulnerable skin of his feet come into contact with the cold earth as he walks, lets the drawn wrap its grey-blue fog around him like gauze.

Harry doesn’t think about leaving this place; he doesn’t think about staying either. He simply breathes, letting the floral-freshness of the humid air cleanses grief and tension out of his lungs and his veins and his heart. And he would keep doing it for entire lifetimes until it was time to finally lay down amongst the rich blooms and let his heart stop beating and melt into the ground, he would—but he doesn’t because, across the fog, a figure is walking towards him.

Harry recognises him at once, and every single drop of blood in his heart and under his skin suddenly boils and boils and burns with the white-hot knowledge that—it can’t be. But  _ it is, it is _ , Harry’s bones sing as the fog parts and Harry can finally make out the stranger’s face—only it’s not a stranger’s at all. It is Draco’s and the knowledge of it cracks Harry’s ribs in splintered halves like lightning. Fire catches in his stomach and he thinks he’ll suffocate from the smoke in his lungs. In his throat. On his tongue.

Draco walks straight towards him, unhurried and gorgeous, his dark cloak billowing around him. Everything about him is exactly as Harry remembers: the lazy, elegant gait and the starlight hair. The bismuth eyes and the messy, complicated feelings that still pool like quicksilver inside Harry’s chest (that drown his spleen and crush his lungs and fill his throat.)

Draco’s lips keep moving as he walks, stretching around words and sentences. The sounds get lost in the heavy, rich silence that fills Harry’s ears like his ears clotted cream or cotton-wool, and an aching kind of loss radiates in the empty spaces between Harry’s ribs. (It makes Harry want to scream.)

“Draco,” Harry whispers instead. The word is a prayer: deafening and tasting of smoke. 

Draco stops in front of Harry. They’re standing so close now that Harry can smell the musk and spice of Draco’s skin, could touch him if he extended his arm, could fist his hand in the soft wool of Draco’s cape and pull him towards him and burrow his face in the softness of his neck.

“Draco,” Harry whispers again as one would cry at the clouds or scream at the sea, with reckless desperation and boundless pain. (He’s afraid that if he moves, Draco will dissipate into thin air or disappear entirely.)

Draco doesn’t answer, or maybe he does and the silence just swallows up all the words. His lips are still moving, red and soft and mesmerising; Harry feels like he’s drowning in fog and silence and the keen sense of loss and longing that scratches at the bone of his jaw. Time stretches, then, with green eyes staring into grey, but just before it entirely stops:

Draco

reaches out

his palm

and

touches Harry.

The skin of his palm is cool and soft and tangible on Harry’s cheek; Harry’s flesh freezes and catches fire all at once. (Frost spreads from the hollow at the base of his throat and onto the skin of his chest. His blood turns into lava, bubbling and hot-thick beneath his skin.)

Harry tries to exhale but his lungs forgot how to breathe at the instant he first caught sight of Draco and his heart doesn’t know how to beat with Draco’s body touching his. He is entirely certain he is going to die this very minute with Draco’s eyes on him, with Draco’s skin on his, with Draco’s beautifully unkissed mouth speaking words he can’t understand. He tries to cover Draco’s hand with his, to touch Draco’s face, to run his fingers through Draco’s hair but his limbs have been turned to stone, heavy and cracked and unmoving. 

“Harry,” Draco says then. His voice tastes thick and sweet like mangoes on Harry’s skin and the low vibration kickstarts Harry’s heart into beating again.

***

“Harry! Harry, please wake up.”

The voice is not Draco’s; the pitch is off and the accent all wrong. 

I groan. Breathing hurts and there’s a swarm of bees buzzing inside my skull. I ignore the firecracker pain that shoots through my back long enough to realise that I’m lying on a cold, hard surface.

“Merlin, Harry! You idiot! What were you thinking, running off on your own?” Ron’s hands are digging into my shoulders as he yells. I sit up and open my eyes. My entire mouth tastes of bitterness and it’s making my stomach churn.

“I’m sorry,” I try to say but it all comes out wrong, words blurring into each other, as the sinking feeling that something is awfully wrong settles in my gut. I am at the same shop I was in just moments ago, with the ingredient shelves and the hardwood floor, only—it is empty. There are no jars on the pine shelves, there are no books or papers or cauldrons. The table has disappeared from the middle of the room, and the chair I sat on. Only the plum curtain still hangs, heavy and dark across the doorway. I can’t make sense of any of it.

“Are you okay, mate?” 

Ron is looking discernibly less angry, now. More worried. I imagine the chill that’s frozen my stomach over shows on my face somehow. I nod weakly and try to manage a smile. (I fail miserably.)

“Do you remember Aaron Woodbridge?” I ask because my brain can’t wrap itself around anything that has happened to me since I drank what I’m beginning to suspect wasn’t a headache-relieving potion at all. “Used to play quidditch for Ravenclaw when we were at Hogwarts or something?”

Ron stares at me like I’ve lost it completely. 

“Mate, we’re getting you back to the office. You’re going to get checked by a healer, and then you’re going to tell me about Wormwood or whatever his name is, and you’re going to tell me the entire story, and you’re going to stop forgetting the excellent reasons I was assigned to be your partner, all of them having to do with not running into danger headfirst and alone.”

I nod. In my state of confused haze, it’s the best I can manage but it seems to placate Ron enough that he claps me on the back and flashes me a small, tight smile. I get up on shaky legs, still not entirely trusting the floor not to cave in under my feet and swallow me whole. 

Ron Apparates us back. 

***

There’s nothing wrong with me. That’s what the healers say in any case. I let them auscult me, casting diagnostic spells that shimmer all around me in flashes of blue and violet light. I don’t move as they frown at the reading and discuss them in hushed whispers, I don’t argue when they tell me I should have been more careful. I also don’t tell them I’ve taken an unknown potion. And so, they let me go back home, instead of making me spend the evening in St Mungo’s getting yelled at by my boss. 

I promise Ron I’ll fill him in on the case in the morning. I’m tired, I say. I add something about just wanting to go home and have a good night’s sleep. Ron doesn’t argue. I can tell he doesn’t believe me either; it’s just that, in the wake of the fiasco that was Malfoy’s death, he learned not to push me to talk before I’m ready.

I hardly register the walk back home, the streets, the houses. My mind keeps circling back to Draco, who was never really my friend and whom I will never have a chance to see again, and my head is full of heavy, confusing thoughts when I finally stop in front of my door. I insert the key in the lock. The metal is cold and smooth under my fingers like it’s always been, and it still makes all the same muted clicks as it works the pins in the mechanism open. I feel like it shouldn’t—because I saw Draco in the lavender-fields. Because he touched my face and said my name. Because I can’t see him again.

Somehow, it feels infuriating that everything hasn’t changed entirely. 

I cross the threshold and close the door behind me. “I had the brilliant idea of drinking an unknown potion that made me hallucinate Draco,” I say out loud in the empty hallway, hoping it might exorcise all the unspeakable feelings that have taken residence inside my chest, “it doesn’t mean anything.” 

Only silence answers me and I feel strangely disappointed. 

Despite my best efforts, it soon becomes clear that spending the entire evening awake and not thinking about Draco is more than I can take. I sit down on the sofa with a quidditch magazine: I feel his presence lingering two steps behind me. I shower: his fingers ghost upon my skin. Everything I eat tastes like bitterness and grief; the dream still clings to my skin, lavender and fog and quicksilver eyes curled tightly inside my chest, heavy and pulsating. It’s all that I can think about.

By 7 o’clock, I am utterly convinced that I need to forget the entire day—wrap it up tightly in a cardboard box in my mind, close it up with string and shipping tape and never open it again. 

I climb into bed, ignoring that sunlight is still flooding my bedroom, and fall asleep.

***

“Harry...”

Draco’s voice jerks Harry awake like a hook to the stomach. His eyes spring open as he takes the deep, hissing breaths of a man who almost drowned.

He doesn’t think it strange that he’s already standing. He doesn’t notice that he can’t remember anything that happened before he heard the voice. He only turns around, instinctively, his entire body moving towards the voice, arms stretched out, heart heavy and desperate. 

There’s nothing there, but the smell of brine and the cries of seagulls. (It washes against his skin in waves.)

Harry is standing on a cliff: many meters below his feet, ever-moving waves lap and lick at the jagged rock, their edges lined with white lace. Sea holly bushes stretch their spiny, powder-blue umbels at the sky and wild fennels undulate softly, green-yellow flowers fragrant and vivid against the grey of sea and sky and cliff. The winds are strong here, whispering in Harry’s ears, caressing his face, and playing in his hair. 

Harry’s chest is hollow with a keen sense of loss and absence.

“Harry,” Draco’s voice says again, and Harry drops to his knees, hands gripping tight handfuls of vegetation as if they could turn into Draco, as if it could hold him back—could stop him from disappearing or dying or being only a disembodied voice in his head. When he opens his palms, he finds only the yellow balls of sea wormwood blooms and the pungent fragrance of alexander leaves and the poison-viscous stains of bittersweet fruit upon his skin.

“I’m here,” Harry whispers then, “I’m here.” And the words scatter away on the wind.

“I wish you were here too,” Harry adds in a strangled sort of voice that is more sob than words. A single tear rolls on his cheek, tracing the line of his jaw and falling from his chin and down, down, down into the blue-green sea, saltwater returning to saltwater.

“I am,” Draco’s voice says, and Harry knows without turning that it is true. He can smell musk and spice on the wind, amongst the seaweed and the brine and the waves. (Inside his chest: his heart swells and swells and swells until the tides of his blood are a storm at sea, crashing against his ribs: Wild. Dangerous. Deafening.)

“Come,” Draco says, “let us walk.” Harry turns, and the sight of Draco punches a hole clean through his chest. Draco is standing amongst the thick, red-pink patches of sea-heath and the dry, swaying stalks of coarse beach-grasses, a dark green velvet cloak wrapped around his shoulders and pulled over his head, his silver eyes liquid and bright. (Alive. Alive. Alive)

Draco pushes the hood of his cloak off his head and extends his hand to Harry, in a slow, elegant gesture. In the palm that Draco turns towards the sky, Harry places his own darker fingers.

They walk on a sandy path between the firework-yellow bushes of gorse and the edge of the cliff. Harry has no memories of standing up, nor does he remember any of what happened after he placed his hand in Draco’s, but he can’t bring himself to care, because Draco’s fingers curl around his own, shielding his skin from the cold and wind. Draco’s face is pure and open as he looks over the cliff at the point where sky and sea meet and melt into each other. 

“Draco,” Harry says because the name fills his lungs and his mouth and his heart.

“There’s something I want to show you,” Draco answers without turning his head towards Harry. “Come.”

Harry’s entirely drunk on Draco’s touch and his beauty and the smell of the sea. There is an intimacy to this cliff, and this sea, and this sky. There is a safety to the heavy, thorny bushes of gorse and the purple-pink splashes of cotton thistles. And so Harry follows, his hand nested in Draco’s still, the sound of their steps softened by sand and knotweed underfoot.

Draco appears to know every step, every stone, every tuft of grass. He doesn’t hesitate when he pulls Harry towards a steep, narrow path that snakes between sharp towering rocks and leads them down, down, down, onto a small, secluded beach. Draco laughs when they set foot on the wet sand and runs towards the sea. Harry holds tight onto Draco’s hand. (He holds onto Draco’s laughter tighter still.) He finds himself barefoot in the sea, with the cool, green-grey waves lapping at his ankles. He’s barefoot. He doesn’t remember taking his shoes off. They face the sea in silence for a while.

“I’ve missed you,” Harry says, without turning his head, as if to the sea.

“I know,” Draco replies in a soft, quiet voice. “I know. I’ve missed you too.”

He turns towards Harry, eyes luminous and pained. Harry’s breath catches in his throat. Draco takes Harry’s other hand in his, carefully, and steps closer, water splashing under his feet and around Harry’s ankles, until their chests are so close they’re almost touching. Under Harry’s skin, blood roars in tempestuous waves and he’s entirely certain he will die, a helpless sailor in this storm.

Draco blinks, once then twice, slowly, delicate blond-white eyelashes obscuring the brightness of his eyes, his gaze still fixed on Harry’s face. His hair is long and loose and tickling Harry’s cheek.

“I’d like to kiss you,” he whispers on to Harry’s skin.

“Yes,” Harry exhales, boneless with more emotion than he ever thought possible to feel. “Oh Merlin, yes.” 

Kissing Draco is a lightning storm and a tidal wave all at once, dangerous and awe-inspiring. Every sound, every breath, every sensation is an earthquake unto its own, and Harry moans into Draco’s mouth, alive and passionate and desperate for more. “Oh Merlin, don’t stop,” he pleads against Draco’s teeth and the tenderness of it all makes his head swim. His chest catches fire from all the points of contact with Draco’s body, warm and firm and tangible against him until Harry is entirely certain he needs that touch in the same way he needs air or water. Harry holds on to Draco like he is drowning, kisses Draco again and again and again, whispering his name into his mouth. Draco tightens his embrace, then, letting go of Harry’s hands to hold onto his hair and the back of his neck. 

The movement throws Harry off balance. 

Harry stumbles, falls into the sea. The cold water soaks his skin and hair as his back makes heavy contact with the wet sand beneath him; the world blurs and distorts as the saltwater washes over his face. When he surfaces again, elbows coming into contact with the seafloor as he pushes himself up, Draco’s face is inches above him, their limbs interwoven beneath the green velvet cover of Draco’s coat floating gently on the waves. Suddenly, it feels all wrong.

“You’re dead,” Harry whispers as the realisation turns the air in his lungs into sulfuric acid.

Draco’s cheeks are stained with tears.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers back at Harry. “I’m sorry.”

***

I wake up in my bed, drenched in sweat and mad with grief. I can barely make it into the bathroom before my stomach is sick, the feeling of Draco’s lips on mine leaving my body like poison. I spend long minutes dry-heaving on the tiled floor, clutching at my chest with desperate hands, my breath catching on my teeth and in my throat.

“Fuck,” I say to the silent darkness of the room before another wave of nausea shakes my cold, clammy body. “Fuck,” I say again because hearing my own voice reassures me because any sound is better than the silence hanging above my head because I need to convince myself that I’m real.

I have no idea what to do now. I don’t know how to be awake or how to be alive in a world where Draco doesn’t hold my hand, and doesn’t breathe into my mouth, and doesn’t kiss my jaw. Draco’s death sits on my lungs heavy and cold like a stone at the bottom of the sea.

I need to go back.

I drag myself back into bed, the sickness roiling in waves at the bottom of my stomach.

I need to go back. I need to talk to him, tell him all the things that have been sitting in the hollow of my throat since he’s been gone. I need to make my peace and finally be over—this. Everything. The fact that I still can’t think about his death without guilt and anger and sadness washing over my skin.

The old Holyhead Harpies shirt I’m wearing is cold and drenched in sweat; I take it off before climbing into bed. Humid frost has settled inside my bones and I shiver under the covers. 

I close my eyes.

It takes me several hours to find sleep again.

***

Harry finds himself sitting on a warm stone bench under the heat of the summer sun. The smell of roses is overpowering; they hang in heavy clusters from an arch above his head. He stands. He’s in a garden of some kind and it is high summer; around him, the flowerbeds are bursting with deep violet aconites contrasting with the yellow-green of lady’s mantle or dotted with white windflowers and pink lilies. He walks along the gravel path, letting the golden light of late afternoon warm his skin.

“Draco?” He whispers on to a large bush of larkspur (pink and violet and white.)

A woman’s voice answers him. 

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she says.

Harry turns around. The woman is wearing a long, gauzy, white gown that looks like something from another time. She’s barefoot; her long blonde hair is untied and falling to her hips. Her blue eyes are wide and wet as she stares at a cluster of Love-in-the-Mists.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she repeats, her voice broken and panicked.

Her face is familiar to Harry, a distant memory from Hogwarts. She was in his year. Slytherin. A girl with a name like a tree or a plant or a brook. He can’t quite put his finger on it.

When Harry asks who she is and if she’s okay and if he can help, she doesn’t answer. Instead, she grabs his wrist in her slender, cool fingers and stares at his face.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she repeats, insistent and anxious. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

Harry doesn’t know what she means, but before he can ask, she collapses into a sobbing heap at his feet.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she whispers, again and again as she covers her face with her hands.

“I’m not supposed to be here.”

Under Harry’s feet, the gravel path dissipates and he falls into the dark.


	3. Ron Weasley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: I am in debt of the lovely [Andithiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andithiel) who was kind enough to point out a handful of mistakes in this chapter. All remaining typos are mine.

“Are we going to talk about what happened yesterday?” Ron is half sitting on his desk when I arrive into our shared office, nursing a cup of lukewarm tea in his fingers. He doesn’t greet me.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, we are.” I take off my cloak and throw it on the back of my chair.

“Pansy came in,” I begin, sitting as Ron waves a quiet warming spell over his tea. “She kept saying she was being drugged.” 

Ron takes a sip of tea and doesn’t look at me. I tap my quill sharply on my desk as if it could release the tension between us.

“By her father,” I add after a while. “Because she’s a lesbian.”

Ron makes a small, unconvinced  _ go on _ sound. I continue.

“She didn’t have a lot to go on, only that she loved Luna and that she doesn’t remember breaking up with her. And she gave me a receipt from a potion shop her dad received regular owl delivery from.”

I rummage through my desk to find the receipt and slide it towards him. Ron inspects it carefully.

“That address is the empty room we found you in,” he says after flicking through the attached interview notes.

“It wasn’t empty,” I say. Ron raises an eyebrow in my direction. “When I went there. It wasn’t empty. It was an actual potion shop, had the name on the door and everything.”

I can tell Ron doesn’t quite believe me. If I’m honest, I don’t quite believe myself either, not with all the strange dreams I’ve been having lately. I take a deep breath and pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers.

“Aaron Woodbridge was there,” I continue. “Said it was his shop. I was talking to him, right before... Listen, Ron. We can look him up. Bring him in. See if he ever owned Hawthorne’s potions and ask him where he was that afternoon. Worst case scenario, I hallucinated the entire thing and we drop it. If not, we have a lead.”

“Yeah.” Ron runs his hand through his hair, his teacup forgotten on the corner of his desk. “Yeah, we can do that. What about Pansy? You trust her story?”

“I—yeah. Yeah, I do. She wasn’t faking it, Ron. Either she’s barking mad and escaped from the Janus Thickey ward, or something really happened to her.”

Ron sighs. I know he’s going to let me take the case. Or pretend like it’s a case.

“Look, mate. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ran off without you. I’m sorry I went and passed out in the middle of a potion shop that turned into an empty room at some point while I was out cold.”

A shadow passes across Ron’s face.

“It was a rotten thing to do. It won’t happen again,” I say, hoping it’ll be enough to make the shadow go away. “I promise.”

“It better not.” I feel the pain in Ron’s words. He flashes me a small smile all the same. “Or I swear I will murder you myself, just to finally stop having to wonder when and how it will happen.”

The tension eases a bit after that. Ron fills in the required case paperwork to send to Robards. I try to occupy my mind with a jewel theft case that landed on my desk a while back. (In my mind: Draco’s skin. Draco’s lips. Draco’s breath.)

“You know, I always wondered why Pansy broke up with Luna,” Ron says after a while. He waves his wand over the completed paperwork and it promptly takes flight and flutters out the door. “Ginny and Luna grew really close, after the war. Luna used to spend a lot of time at the burrow, before I moved in with Hermione, drove my mum a little crazy with all her weird ideas.”

I snort at the idea of Molly being told there are imaginary creatures in her hair. Ron smiles, a fond look on his freckled face.

“Do you remember the break-up?”

“Yeah, it was after—” he stops mid-sentence.

“After the funeral,” I cut in to save him from saying the words, “Draco’s funeral.”

“Yeah. After that. Maybe three weeks or a month? She came by the burrow one evening. She was dressed strangely, even for her. I think she had a welly on—just the one. And a nightdress. I didn’t really stare at her for too long, honestly. She kept crying, and I was happy enough to let Ginny deal with that.”

“And she never told you why they broke up?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t ask, though. It wasn’t really my place to get involved in my sister’s friend’s love life. But I always wondered. They’d both seemed so in love, and they had plans to move in together, I think. I remember that because that’s when Hermione and I were looking for a flat. And it just seemed so sudden when they broke up.” Ron lets out a dry, tense laugh. “I think I was just too afraid that the same would happen to me and Hermione to really care at the time, you know?”

I don’t, of course. It’s not like I’ve had any relationship worth mentioning in my entire life. Ginny was the longest I ever was with someone but we were too young for it to become really serious and things kind of fizzled out after the war. There’s been no one, since then. (Not until I decided to go and fall in love with a ghost.)

“So Pansy’s story wasn’t entirely fabricated,” I say instead of any of the things that just ran through my head. “She mentioned a lot of those things. The funeral, moving in.”

Ron sits up. I can see I have his attention, now. I can see he’s not just humouring me like he’s done ever since Draco died and turned my world upside down.

“Tell me what really happened in Pansy’s interview,” he demands, opening his notebook and searching around his desk for a quill. “All of it. In detail.”

By the time I finish filling him in, he’s written five pages of illegible notes and sent two requests to our research department: one for Pansy, the other for Aaron Woodbridge. I feel like I’ve gotten a tiny bit closer to finding out the truth.

***

Sleep eludes me that night.

That is a lie. Let me start again.

I elude sleep that night. I pretend there’s nothing out of the ordinary as I sit in the dark, as I watch the hands on the clock play tag with each other. At two in the morning, I stand up and make myself coffee.

It’s not that I don’t want to see Draco again. It’s not (oh, Merlin, no) that I don’t want to kiss him again. It’s just that I can’t stand waking up from these dreams and finding out that he’s dead all over again.

(It’s just that I never knew I wanted this when he was still there, and it’s just that I can’t ever have it now, and the pain of it is tracing fault lines onto my bones.)

So I elude sleep, and I drink coffee in the pitch darkness of night, and I pretend it’s a permanent solution.

***

“Pansy’s missing,” Ron announces the next morning, holding a thick file the people from research sent over. “Her mother filled in a missing person’s report the day after you saw her. Said she never came home from a shopping errand.”

“I don’t blame her. If her father was drugging her, she’d be pretty stupid to go back.” 

I am nervously rummaging through my desk for no particular reason. I haven’t slept all night. My mouth tastes of caffeine. My hands are shaking with exhaustion and anxiety.

“No trace of mental illnesses in her file, though. No visit to the Janus Thickey ward. No mind healers in recent years. Besides, her mum would probably have thought to mention that kind of thing when she reported her missing.”

“We’ll need to check with Luna. Pansy might try to make contact with her again.” 

I am methodically ripping an old sheet of case notes to shreds and watching the pieces flutter onto the dark wood of my desk. Ron reaches for a quill to make a note, then sits back in his chair.

“What about Aaron Woodbridge ?” I ask because I desperately need him to not be dead or missing or some sort of hallucination.

Ron thumbs through the paper.

“Graduated from Hogwarts,” he reads, “Mastery in potion from someplace in France. Worked in Limoges for a while…  _ Aux mille onguents... _ His own potion shop...”

Ron mutters under his breath as he goes through the rest of Woodbridge’s file. A weight lifts off my chest at the realisation I may not have imagined everything after all.

“Oh, wait! That’s interesting…” Ron raises his head and looks at me. “Says here he doesn’t work anymore. Something about an injury sustained in a previous job. He’s on ministry benefits from what I can tell.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time someone lied about injuries,” I say, “and ran an undeclared, illegal business on the side.”

“How about we pay him a visit and find out?” Ron suggests, raising an eyebrow at me.

I grin.

***

The visit to Woodbridge’s place of residence is a disaster. We Apparate mid-afternoon to a location in a nice part of wizarding London, somewhere posh and quiet and within walking distance of his flat. I almost splinch myself with exhaustion. Nausea turns my stomach inside out and I have to lean against a wall and take slow, steady breaths for the better part of a minute to keep my lunch of a sandwich and seven black coffees.

It doesn’t get any better. 

Woodbridge’s flat is in a tall, white-stone building and I suddenly realise it’s not a flat at all, but an entire house, right in the heart of wizarding London. Ron and I look at each other as we double-check we have the right address.

“Never knew you could afford a place like that on Ministry benefits, mate,” I whisper under my breath as I take in the wrought iron and glass awning and the columns on each side of the door.

“You can’t,” Ron replies, a bitter kind of anger pulsating low and heavy in his voice like a black cloud.

I walk up the stairs leading to the front door and I knock on the lacquered wood. Silence answers me. I turn to look at Ron. I knock again, louder.

“You can knock all day, no one’s going to answer,” a voice behind us says. I turn, wand raised. The man is in his early twenties, blond and slim and obviously dressed for garden work of some sort.

“Aurors.” Ron waves his wand. His credentials appear in glowing gold script in the air. “Identify yourself.”

“Oleander Crow. I’m the gardener here.” The man wipes his hands on his battered leather apron. I lower my wand.

“What do you mean no one’s going to answer?” I ask while Ron writes down the man’s name in his notebook.

“The man who used to live here? Put the house up for sale a couple of days ago. I work for Obum & Woolcock real estate—getting the garden nice and trim for the visits.” The man’s accent is neutral and elegant, the accent of someone accustomed to working for people richer than he’ll ever be, but I can hear a trace of something rougher and more Northern dancing at the back of his throat. “I can let you in if you want a look around. They gave me the keys.”

The house is entirely empty. No furniture, no objects. Nothing. Crow doesn’t know when it was put up for sale, and Ron makes a note to check with the agency. We climb up the stairs, open all the doors to the large, sunlit bedrooms, every single one of them empty. Woodbridge has well and truly disappeared. 

Exhaustion is turning the world into a blur of colours and noise by the time we make it back to the office. Ron collapses in his chair. I lean against my desk, too afraid that I’ll fall asleep if I sit.

“That was a right disaster,” I mutter, finding a half-drunk cup of coffee I had abandoned on my desk and spelling it warm. The sudden smell of reheated caffeine makes my stomach quench. I take a sip all the same.

“It was.” 

Ron is filling in the paperwork to request information on Oleander Crow and the agency employing him, even though we both know it’s useless. Woodbridge is gone, and whatever we uncover has very little chance of having anything to do with him. 

“Well, that was our only lead,” he sighs when he’s spelled the forms into paper cranes and sent them floating gently out of the door. He looks at me and I can feel a question in his gaze: what now?

“Can I ask you something a bit strange?” I blurt out because I am struck with the sudden certainty that the blonde girl from my dream is relevant to this case, and also because I have not slept enough to think better of it.

Ron nods.

“There was a girl at Hogwarts. In our year. Pure-blood, I think. Slytherin. Quiet. Pretty in a bland sort of way. Blonde, with blue eyes and a last name like a flower or a forest or something?”

Ron raises an eyebrow. I take another sip of dreadful coffee, in hopes the world around me will solidify and make sense again.

“Look,” I say,” Look. I know it sounds crazy. Call it gut instinct or whatever you will but just trust me on this, okay?” 

“Greengrass,” Ron sighs, “Ginny had a thing with her younger sister Astoria during their last year at Hogwarts. Broke up after a short while, but they liked each other well enough to stay friends and she used to drop by the burrow every now and then.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” I am more and more certain we need to investigate this. “Daphne, I think her name was? Let’s see if she can come in tomorrow. We need to question her.”

“Do we, now?” Ron is looking thoroughly unimpressed with my sudden stroke of genius.

“Pansy… Um... I think Pansy might have said something. About her. When she came in.” 

I am still a terrible liar.

“Mate, you didn’t even know her name.” Ron looks resigned. I know he doesn’t believe me. I also know he’s going to let me bring her in for questioning tomorrow.

***

The room is cold and white and Harry feels a shiver running down his spine. It’s not the same dream, he knows it at once, there is no sea here, no sky and no vegetation. Only a white room with no doors or windows. Harry walks to the wall and lets his fingers run over the smooth surface. Anxiety runs up and down his ribs like ants. He needs to get out of here.

“Potter. What the hell are you doing here?”

The voice stops Harry’s heart like a million tiny seizures, it sucks the air clean out of Harry’s lungs until Harry wants to drop to his knees and sob.

He doesn’t.

He turns around instead, and sure enough, Draco is standing there, behind a potion bench and a large bubbling cauldron. His arms are crossed, his brow furrowed.

“Draco?” Harry asks tentatively, not daring to move or breathe because he’s entirely certain that if he does, he will catch fire from the memory of the man’s lips upon his, of the man’s hands upon his skin, of the man’s voice curling inside the shell of his ear.

“Potter, are you quite well?” Draco’s voice is sharp and cold as ice. He runs his hand through his hair and sighs. “Of course, you would show up here. It wasn’t bad enough being stuck inside this room by myself. Of course, you have to be here too!”

The world crumbles around Harry’s ears.

“You might as well sit,” Draco mutters, “you’re not going anywhere soon. No doors on here, though it may have escaped your exceptional powers of observation.”

Harry does not sit. Harry listens to the thunderous roar of blood in his ears, and Harry tries to steady himself, fingers grasping for purchase on the cool whiteness of the walls, and Harry lets darkness swim before his eyes like a plague of locusts, in a million dancing dots.

“You’re dead.” The words are a strangled whisper, but Harry holds onto them like they’re the edge of a cliff and the only thing that keeps him from falling into the vast emptiness below.

“Don’t be an idiot, Potter.” Draco turns around. On the bench, behind him, Harry can see the ingredients laid out neatly, the green of dittany leaves contrasting sharply with the soft indigo of aconite blooms and the vivid violet-red of bitter root flowers. “I’m obviously not dead. I’m just trapped here.”

Silence settles heavy and suffocating between them. Convincing Draco of his untimely death is more than Harry can handle. (Not when the truth of it still cuts his flesh into ribbons, not when it still stabs sharp needles into his bones and twists his tendons into Gordian knots.) Harry presses his fingers onto his eyelids tightly and watches the spots of colour dancing behind his vision instead.

When he opens his eyes again, Draco is still standing in the same spot, only, instead of glaring at Harry, he’s staring at his fingers in disbelief. His fingers are coated in a thick, viscous, red substance. On the left breast of his white robe, a crimson stain is spreading, lazy and wet and stomach-churning.

Draco lets out a small, terrified whimper.

The whole room smells of copper and war.

Harry collapses on the floor.


	4. Daphne Greengrass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The wonderful [Emma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheous87/pseuds/orpheous87) has stepped in and agreed to beta the rest of this fic. Her input and her kind words of encouragement have been invaluable from the very beginning, and I certainly wouldn't have written as much without her reliable presence in the sprint channel on discord. Thank you for making it all happen.

“I’m not entirely sure how I can help you.” 

Daphne sits primly on the edge of her chair, her delicate fingers playing in the pastel pink chiffon of her dress.

“It’s just a routine interview,” Ron lies smoothly. “We’re investigating Pansy Parkinson’s disappearance from her home and we’d like to ask you a few questions, that’s all.”

Daphne relaxes at that, smoothing the fabric over her lap with perfectly manicured fingers. She smiles.

“Of course, we are all very worried about her.”

“Were you two close?” I step forward from my position against the wall to lean against the corner of Ron’s desk as I speak.

“Yes, I suppose we were. We were in the same year and the same house at Hogwarts, you know that, and we grew closer after Draco’s death. It really affected her, you know. Losing her first love like that would affect anyone, even years after they’ve broken up.” 

Despite the gravity of her words, Daphne’s face is emotionless. She’s sitting perfectly still in her chair, and I am suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that there is something very wrong here, something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Behind me, I hear Ron’s quill scratching parchment in rapid, frantic motions. 

“That was quite a while back, Miss Greengrass,” Ron cuts in, “I was told she had found someone new. Was engaged to be married, even.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course. I didn’t mean to say she wasn’t happy with Miles. If anything, we grew closer after she met him. You see, they met through my fiancé, Lucian Bole.” 

At the motion of the name, Daphne’s lips curl into a smile. I watch her intently as she tells us about the regular afternoon teas and occasional formal dinners she’s shared with Pansy over the past years. She seems serene, but all I can think of is the distress of her face in the garden and the broken way she kept repeating she didn’t belong there. It ties my stomach into knots. 

“...and we were going to get married on the same day, this summer,” Daphne continues, “We were going to have a garden party at Bletchley Manor. Not that Lucian’s own childhood home doesn’t have beautiful grounds, of course, but Bletchley Manor has those beautiful, century-old lime trees. For shade, you understand? Oh and now, poor Pansy, she might never get the beautiful wedding she’s always dreamed of!” 

As if on cue, Daphne’s eyes glisten with unshed tears at the idea that Pansy might not get married. She whispers a small, wet “excuse me” as she searches through her handbag for a handkerchief, which she uses to dab delicately at her eyes. The motion is graceful, but I find myself noticing how stilted it is. Come to think of it, Daphne makes me think of a doll rather than a person, with her pink chiffon dress and white knitted cardigan draped around her shoulders, with her golden hair falling to her shoulders in neat curls and the tasteful, nude makeup charms adorning her face, with the way both her feet are neatly tucked under her chair and both her hands are resting, palm down in her lap. She’s too calm for a real person, too carefully put together, too delicate and graceful.

“So you’ve had no contact with Pansy ever since she disappeared, is that correct?” I ask because I suddenly want to shake her until she wakes from her stupor.

“It is correct. We’ve all been so dreadfully worried, I would never hide anything I knew from Miles. The poor man was all ready to get married, and suddenly, the woman he loves just disappears into thin air. I do hope you find her soon, I can’t imagine what could have happened to her!” Daphne’s hands tighten over the smooth beige leather of her handbag in a grotesque imitation of grief.

Before she can lament the possibility that Pansy and Miles may not get their perfect summer wedding any further, Ron stands up and thanks her for coming in. As she promises to keep us informed if she hears anything new, I find myself hoping that Pansy’s safe and well-hidden and that no-one will ever force her to marry a man she hates under the shade of the lime trees of Bletchley Manor. I close the door to our office behind her. It glows briefly as the ministry standard protection and silencing charms activate once again. I turn to Ron, sighing audibly.

“Merlin, that was a proper trip,” he exclaims, eyes wide in disbelief. 

I let out a small dry laugh. “Tell me about it.”

“No, no. You don’t understand. I knew you were bringing her in today, so I flooed Ginny yesterday, right? Figured I’d get a few primers on her, try to understand why you were so keen on interviewing her.” Ron’s speech is animated and rapid. I can see the gears turning in his head as he tries to connect the dots.

“And?” I ask because I know now there are dots to be connected. Ron is nothing if not a brilliant Auror.

“And Ginny remembered a surprising amount about Daphne, as it turns out. Astoria talked about her often. There used to be a lot of tension at home, from what I understood. They were the old-fashioned kind, the Greengrasses, wanted their oldest daughter to marry a good pureblood lad and devote her life to giving them grandchildren. Daphne was having none of that. She was ambitious and driven and a bit of a rebel. Wanted to be a stage actress, I think. She was good at it too, she could have travelled the world and lived from her art. She was in love with books and stories and poems, in a way she could never love any man.”

I think of Pansy sitting in my office with her fingers digging into her thigh through the grey wool of her skirt. I think of her tears and her anger and the way she spat Miles Bletchley’s name like poison or spoiled milk. I think of the gauzy, white dress Daphne wore in the dream and I am entirely certain now that it was a stage costume of some sort, something Sarah Bernhardt might have worn in  _ La Dame aux Camélias _ . I can feel the pieces of the puzzle start falling into place.

Ron flashes me a grin.

“I don’t know how you knew we needed to interview her, and I’m not even going to ask but whatever it is you’re doing, mate? Keep doing it. We may just have a lead again!”

I mutter something about gut feeling as Ron claps me on the back. I can tell he’s alive with the challenge of solving the case, and I am suddenly grateful that he’s with me in this. I consider telling him about the potion, and the dreams, and how Draco’s skin felt against mine. I know he’d have my back on this too because that’s what he’s always done. I know he wouldn’t understand but he would try, and in the end, that’s all that matters. I know I could trust him with it all, and I know it would be alright; I know he could crack the mystery open, split it in two like a crisp apple in autumn and pick out all the pips and spoiled bits and things that don’t quite make sense until all that’s left is the pure and unadulterated truth, rational and reliable.

Ron informs me I’m having supper with him and Hermione.

I don’t know why I don’t tell him everything.

***

We go straight to Ron’s flat after work. As we walk through the streets of London, talking about inconsequential things (quidditch predictions, and Arthur’s recent obsession with electric mixers, and Molly’s attempts at baking a  _ tarte tatin _ for Fleur), my mind keeps drifting back to Daphne Greengrass in her pink dress and white cardigan, sitting primly on the dark-wood chair in our office, crying crocodile tears at the thought of Pansy not getting the wedding she never even wanted in the first place. I can tell Ron is thinking the same thing, and the instant we step into his flat and close the door behind us, the case is all we can talk about.

“The thing I don’t get is—why,” Ron says, casting a simple cooling charm on a couple of beers and handing me one. We’re sitting on the sofa, waiting for Hermione to come home from work. “Why would they want to drug their daughters? Why force them into lives so entirely removed from their aspirations and their passions? What are they getting out of it?”

I open my beer and take a swig, letting the cool, bitter liquid sit on my tongue before swallowing it. 

“Yeah,” I reply, “and what I really can’t wrap my head around is—we’ve all lost people we loved in the war. No matter the side, we’ve all had more than our share of loss and grief. Why would you want to change the people you didn’t lose so much that you can’t even recognise them?”

The floo flares open at that instant in crackling fireworks of green-yellow sparks. I can hear Hermione’s muffled voice on the other side as she bids her colleagues good night.

“Fear,” she says before she’s even properly stepped through. I can’t help but smile at that. She’s always been a little too keen, a little too prompt to jump in the middle of any discussion with an explanation or a fact. I’ve learned to love her for it.

“Why they would change the people they love, I mean,” she explains, brushing the soot from her dark Unspeakable robes before plopping down on the sofa. “Fear of losing their identity, their traditions, their culture. You’d be amazed at how ready some people are to lose the people they love so they won’t feel like they’re losing their way of life.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. Ron must have filled her in on our case at some point. I turn to him to gauge his reaction, but he’s gotten up, and he’s walking towards the kitchen with the muttered promise of bringing her a beer.

“Just think,” Hermione continues, her eyes shining in a way that tells me she is about to launch a full-blown conference on the subject. “All the victims are women so far, aren’t they?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” I protest, taking a sip of my beer.

Hermione sighs and presses the fingers of her right hand just above her right eyebrow. I can tell I’m being idiotic, but I'm not entirely sure what I’m missing.

“Think of any pureblood family you know. Not the Weasleys, obviously, though maybe that would work too. Take the Malfoys, or the Blacks, for instance. Now, can you tell me what any of these women do for a job?”

I open my mouth to say I don’t know what the men do either, and it probably boils down to them being rich enough to think having 4 o’clock tea parties every day of the week is a full-time career. Thankfully, before I can say any of that, Ron comes back with a beer. He hands it to Hermione and sits down next to her as I realise that I know Lucius used to be on the board of Hogwarts Governors and that Ted Tonks used to work for the owl post office for a while before he was forced into hiding.

“Oh,” I mutter eloquently when it dawns on me that I don’t even know if Andromeda trained as anything after Hogwarts or if she worked at all before Nymphadora was born.

“Yes.” Hermione opens her beer with a rather unnecessary spell instead of using a bottle opener like a normal person. “Now, tell me, what do the pureblood women you know do, instead of having a career and a salary?”

“They care for children?” 

I don’t know if Molly ever had a job either. I sneak a look at Ron, wondering how he feels about this discussion. He’s staring at his girlfriend intently with a thoughtful look on his freckled face. The thought crosses my mind that we’re both learning some difficult truths about the world tonight.

“That’s right.” Hermione is either oblivious to how much this conversation is out of our comfort zone, or she’s deliberately ignoring it. Either way, she looks rather pleased about having proven her point, and she takes a sip of her beer before she continues. “And you know that domestic labour has been constantly devalued throughout history. I mean, look at the house-elves! They work all day long, and not only do wizards ignore them most of the time, but they don’t pay them a single knut either!”

“And you’ve made it plenty clear that it’s wrong, Hermione,” Ron cuts in, “but what does it have to do with people sedating their daughters or girlfriends with potions?”

“I’m coming to it. See, when the same half of the population is consistently forced to do tasks that aren’t valued or even recognised as work, while the other half of the population gets to pick a career they like and are paid money for it, that second half is going to start thinking that the first half is worth less than they are or is somehow less human than they are.”

“But I don’t think you’re worth less than me!” Ron objects, obviously offended Hermione could even think this might be the case.

“That’s because you’re not a giant arsehole, but do keep up. We’re talking about old fashioned pureblood families—you know, the same who wanted to commit genocide a few years back? Also, it’s not so much that every man thinks that every woman is below him, it’s a general thing. Generally speaking, men think that women are not quite as human as they are. They might not think about it in those terms, but when it comes to having children and raising them and taking care of the home, they tend to assume it is the woman’s calling to do all that work instead of asking her if she actually wants to do it.”

Hermione stops speaking to take a breath then and shoots me a small, tense smile. I remember Daphne in my dream, passionate and panicked and hurt. Then, I remember Daphne in my office this morning, who wanted nothing better than to give everything up to get married. I know Hermione’s right. She often is.

“So when a woman doesn’t want to get married,” I say slowly, “because she wants to be an actress or because she’s a lesbian… What then?”

“Well, men are going to feel cheated, aren’t they? Because they were promised a loving wife to serve them. Because they were expecting their daughter to follow in the footsteps of their mothers. Because they never once imagined their bloodline could end with their own children. And men who feel cheated? They’re angry, Harry. They think they’re right, they think they’re owed something, and that makes them dangerous.”

“And this is why they are so willing to poison them,” I continue, “because they think it’s who their daughters really are, deep down. The potion is turning their daughters into the women they’ve been raised to be—compliant and all-sacrificing—and the men, they think it’s making things  _ right _ because this is how they’ve always expected everyone’s life to go.”

Hermione beams. She’s always a little too proud of me whenever I finally understand what she’s trying to explain, but I can never really bring myself to find it irritating. 

“Exactly. And in Pansy’s case, the anger and the fear run even deeper than that. The idea that she's a lesbian, the idea that she will never be tied to a man who can keep her in check— they feel robbed of her attention and desire. They’re furious and frightened because she’s rendering them entirely useless, and they don’t know how to live in a world that doesn’t revolve around them at all times.” 

There is anger in her words. Not at me, but at the injustice of it all. I can’t blame her. We sit in silence for a while, then, Ron asks:

“So, what kind of men are we looking for, would you say?” 

She launches into a lengthy dissertation on the subject, because of course, she does. At some point, Ron gets up to find a quill and starts taking notes, while I try not to think about all the women who, at that very moment, might be in bed with someone they never loved, planning a wedding they never wanted, carrying a child they never chose. When she’s finally done talking, and we’re finally done asking questions, the moon has begun its slow course above the roofs of London and I can’t help but feel overwhelmingly grateful for the presence of both of them in my life.

***

I Apparate home later that night, with a belly full of takeaway Chow Mein and laughter still clinging to my lips. I’m taking off my boots, still smiling to myself at a joke Hermione made and at the way Ron looked at her like she was the sun, when the dizziness hits me. My vision blurs as the world around me starts spinning.

I try to steady myself against the wall. My hands are heavy as lead and brush against the cold stone as I fall down.

My shoulder hits the floor first. Then: my head. My elbow. My hip. My entire body lights up in pain fireworks, white and blinding.

The world turns dark.

I pass out.

***

Harry wakes up on a cold surface. Before he even opens his eyes, his stomach sinks. There is no brine here, no sounds of wind or birds. He knows it’s the white room with the all-wrong Draco (who does not take his hand, who does not kiss him or whisper his name into his hair.)

A pair of firm hands grab his shoulders, fingers digging into his flesh, forcing him to sit up. 

“Potter! You disappeared! How did you do it? How?”

The voice is frantic and broken. Harry opens his eyes. Draco is staring at him, wild-eyed and dishevelled. The room smells like ditany and cauldron cleaning spells.

“You disappeared, Potter. You were there one minute and gone the next. How did you do it? How did you do it?”

Draco’s words flow off his tongue like a waterfall, fingers still iron-gripped on Harry’s shoulders, eyes storm-wild on Harry’s face.  _ Beautiful, _ Harry thinks, before he remembers that this Draco will not speak his name like a binding-spell, will not let him kiss him in the briny embrace of the waves. (The realisation makes his ribs tighten around his heart and the oxygen turn to stone inside his lungs.)

“Tell me. How did you do it? How did you do it? Tell me. Why are you back now? Why did you come back?”

“I… I’ve been having these dreams,” is Harry’s reply.

“Dreams,” Draco repeats, hands falling limply to his sides. “Dreams,” he says again, slightly louder, standing up. He sounds like an ice shelf about to collapse, like lava licking at rock, like fissures forming in the face of a mountain.

“I… Look. The truth is, I don’t think you’re real.”

As soon as the words leave Harry’s mouth, he knows it was the wrong thing to say. In Draco’s face, the avalanche starts to form.

“Not real?” Draco is pacing around the room, gesticulating wildly. “Not real?” he repeats, his voice shrill and high. He is facing the wall and talking to no one in particular. “Not real?”

Draco turns suddenly to face Harry, anger lighting up his face like a wildfire. “And what exactly, pray tell, do you mean by that? How exactly does your idiocy-addled brain come to the preposterous conclusion that I’m not real as I’m standing right in front of you, as I’m talking to you—as I’ve just physically touched you, for Merlin’s sake?”

_ Because you kissed me, _ Harry wants to scream.  _ Because I’m falling for you and because you’re dead. Because all I have are these—dreams. (Because I don’t even have them now.) _

Harry doesn’t scream. Doesn’t tell Draco about the time they kissed on top of a cliff. Doesn’t tell Draco that he held his hand and spoke his name in the middle of a lavender field. “I miss you,” he whispers, instead. His fingernails dig into the palm of his hand, shooting star-burst pain up his wrist, anchoring him to whatever tiny grasp on reality he still has left.

“I miss you so much,” he whispers again, salt-wet tears rolling down his cheeks, round as pearls and heavy as lead. “And I wish I didn’t, Draco. I wish there wasn’t a gaping hole behind my ribs that holds your shape and bears your name. But the truth is: there is, Draco, there is.”

And it doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. Not the roomless door, or the stone-cold floor Harry’s still sitting on. Not Draco’s alarmed expression, or the saltwater sea of grief on Harry’s cheeks. And there are two boys in this room, but one is dead and the other is passed out cold in a hallway somewhere, and neither can quite remember how to be human, so one cries and the other does nothing.

Minutes pass. Hours perhaps, or days, or seconds, but does it matter?

Behind his eyes, Harry can feel the fabric of reality starting to blur, the edge of his vision blackening and smudging. Draco lunges forward, kneeling down to him, grabbing his wrist between iron-vice fingers.

“Potter! Potter don’t!”

Draco’s voice is wrapped in cotton wool, now, soft and muted. Harry closes his eyes.

“Potter! Harry! Harry, don’t disappear.”

Harry can feel the warm grasp of fingers on his skin dissolving in the cool darkness, the soft breeze of Draco’s breath on his neck flickering into a cold draught of night air.

“Don’t leave me alone again.”

***

It is the last thing I hear. 

I wake up, cold and disoriented, on the antique red and white cement tiles of the hallway, with tear-wet cheeks and a bruised wrist.


	5. Luna Lovegood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got away from me and is a bit heavier than I intended. Warning for mentions of death & grief and for discussion of Pansy's trauma. Be safe.
> 
> As always, many thanks to [ Emma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheous87/) who wrangled my swearing into proper Englishness and my punctuation into readability.

I drag myself into work the next day with sleep-heavy eyes and a chest full of stones. The chill from the hallway tiles settled inside my bones at some point before the sun rose, and my flesh is still heavy with the cold uneasiness of waking up in odd places.

I don’t think about it.

Ron’s desk is empty when I walk into our office. My stomach fills halfway with panic before I remember that he’s consulting on another case today, something about an abduction or a missing person — something important and delicate that requires quick thinking and strategy. I sigh and press my fingers into my eyes before stepping into the hallway and summoning the ministry tea trolley. As it floats towards me at an infuriatingly sluggish speed, I smooth a few creases out of the heavy burgundy wool of my Auror robe. I consider glamouring away the bags under my eyes for good measure; I settle for a large mug of insipid Earl Grey instead—the first sip burns my tongue and I welcome the lingering pain as proof that I exist.

As I walk back into the office, I try not to think about when I stopped feeling alive. I try not to think about when I started waking up in places where I couldn’t remember falling asleep.

I try not to think about the bruises that curl like bracelets around my wrists.

I settle at my desk and immediately file a request for information on Lucian Bole. Then, I do the same for Miles Bletchley. Then, I run out of ideas for ways to occupy my day.

I fuss with the bric-a-brac on my desk, organising it in neat parallel rows. It does not soothe me at all. I stop. I stand up. I sit back down. I take my head into my hands and realise I’m not going to make it through the day if I don’t find something to do.

I’ve half convinced myself to take the rest of the day off, to go home and sleep it or drink it away when Prisimus Plums knocks on my door. Prisimus works for the department of Pensieve Memories, he’s older than Merlin, blind as a bat and sharper than a knife. I smile when he asks if I would mind terribly helping him.

“Not at all,” I say, almost dizzy with relief. 

I spend the rest of the day sorting through corrupted memories, sifting through all the made-up details to separate the rare nuggets of truth.

***

Harry remembers dimly collapsing in the ancient kitchen of Grimmauld Place after work. There are soft, warm fingers on his neck, now. There’s that subtle scent of cedarwood and moss, and Harry could cry with relief. The contact of Draco’s skin fills his veins with lightning and his heart with something else entirely, a feeling of belonging and home. He takes a sharp breath. He opens his eyes. Draco removes his hand with a soft gasp as if Harry’s skin was made entirely of embers or molten wax and slumps against the wall. Harry sits up, slowly. There is static in his chest and electricity on his teeth from the contact still, and he can’t remember how to push words off his tongue. (Words that are not  _ you kissed me _ and  _ touch me _ and  _ please, oh please, touch me. _ )

Draco’s voice breaks the silence, small and fragile.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get so angry before.” He pauses. Then, whispers, “Not when you’re the first person I’ve been able to talk to since I’ve been here.”

Harry opens his mouth to tell Draco he’s not here, that they’re not even really talking—that Draco’s dead and Harry’s passed out on a floor somewhere. He knows if he does, the dream will dissipate. He knows those words will coat Draco’s soft, warm fingers in sticky red blood. He thinks it might be enough to stop him from thinking about all the ways those fingers touched him, about how they felt on his skin, or about how Draco will never touch him for real. 

He doesn’t say anything—for there is hope in Draco’s face, bright and delicate, and Harry doesn’t have the heart to squash it underfoot like a weed or a wasp or a rotten plum.

“What do you do here, then?” he asks instead. It’s a stupid question. It’s the kind of question he should be asking an old acquaintance, met perchance on the corner of Diagon Alley. It’s the kind of question that fits in polite small-talk, the kind of question that only serves to fill enough minutes with words, until it’s polite to smile and say goodbye and never think of it ever again.

It’s a stupid question, all-wrong in its shape and sound and meaning. ( _ Why did you kiss me, _ Harry meant to ask. And:  _ Would you do it again? _ )

(And:  _ Would you have done it if you were still alive? _ )

“I brew,” Draco answers, gesturing towards the workbench, littered in cauldrons and potion ingredients. “It’s the only thing that’s been keeping me sane. I’ve made quite a lot of progress on the research I was carrying out—”

Draco’s voice dies out, and his eyes fill with salt-wet tears.

“Where do the ingredients come from?” Harry asks because if Draco starts to cry, he knows he won’t resist pulling him close. And then, he’s entirely certain, he’ll combust from the heat of Draco’s skin, from the tangibility of Draco’s shoulders or from the softness of Draco’s hair. 

(From his own, unbearable want.)

“They just appear. It’s really quite interesting, I spent days trying to figure out how it happened when I first came here.” Draco turns, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. The impulse to take Draco’s face between his hands, to wipe the tears away with the pad of his thumb sets fire to the gasoline heart inside Harry’s chest. He doesn’t move. Instead, he curls his fingers into tight balls at his side until the joints hurt, and he follows Draco to the potion bench without a word.

“They’re always the same ingredients too,” Draco adds, crushing the soft indigo blooms of monkshood between his fingers until the blue stains his skin. (Harry wants to taste that stain; he wants to lick it away and suck on the flesh underneath. He bites his lip instead.)

“And they’re always fresh. I don’t cast any stasis charms on them or anything, they just don’t wilt or rot or go bad. That’s how I figured out this room, whatever it is, had to have pretty strong magic,” Draco continues, eyes still cast down at his blue-stained skin. “Some of this stuff here has been sitting on this bench since I first came here. It’s stayed fresh for—”

“ —two years,” Harry whispers without thinking. Draco’s face turns to him, lightning-quick and pain-stricken.

“What did you say?”

“Two years,” Harry repeats, tears sitting heavy on his throat now that the end is inevitable. “That’s how long it’s been since you died.”

Draco stumbles, collapsing against the wall, the vicious red spreading thick and wet across his chest. He clutches at it with panicked hands, gasps for breath, eyes wide and wet and terribly afraid.

“I’m sorry,” Harry whispers as the room disappears around him. “I’m sorry,” he repeats in the cold darkness as something warm trickles from his lip and rolls slowly down onto his chin. His teeth taste of copper. In his chest, his heart is lead-heavy and pain-swollen.

***

I register the cold, hard floor beneath my back and the sound of the floo blaring open at the same time. Before I have time to panic, Ron’s voice calls my name. I get up, cracks running through my every bone, both from the fall I took when I passed out and from the memory of Draco with tears in his eyes and blood on his chest.

“Harry! Harry, you need to come! Quick!” Ron’s voice is frantic. Excited. I drag myself in front of the fireplace.

“It’s 11 at night, mate,” I grouse because there are still tears clinging to my eyelashes and I desperately want Ron not to see them, “whatever it is, can’t it wait until the morning?”

“Trust me, Harry, you’ll want to see this,” is Ron’s reply before his face disappears from the green flame, leaving me the space to step through.

I step through the Floo because there’s nothing else for me to do, really. I can’t sleep, haven’t been able to since I took that blasted potion. All I do every time I close my eyes is watch Draco die or disappear, and I was only going to spend another night staring at the hands on the clock, waiting for the sun to rise. Whatever it is Ron needs to show me is bound to be more interesting than that.

The first thing I see when I come out of the Floo is Pansy sitting on Ron’s sofa. She looks tense, her red-painted lips pressed together into a thin line, her manicured fingers pressing into her temple as she talks to Hermione. Next to her is Luna, watching her intently, a soft hand resting on her leg. The sight of Luna’s pale skin on Pansy’s dark jeans is enough to make my heart ache with vague feelings of longing and loss. I refrain from examining where they come from.

“Oh, hello, Harry,” Luna says when she sees me, a small smile lighting up her face. Pansy and Hermione both turn their faces to me.

“You want to sit down,” Ron says. Hermione hands me a beer. There are several empty bottles on the coffee table already.

“We’re drinking because there’s no way I’m getting through that shit without some alcohol in my system,” Pansy informs me.

She’s elegant still, in her black, oversized, wool sweater, dark jeans and burgundy leather boots, but she looks like she’s put herself together to stop herself from falling apart. Her eyes are red-rimmed and frantic, her motions are stilted, her entire demeanour twitchy and anxious. Luna squeezes her leg gently as Pansy takes a swig of beer.

“Luna Flooed us when Pansy started remembering things she experienced while under the influence of the potion,” Ron explains, sitting down on the armrest of Hermione’s chair.

"Insofar as experienced is the right word." Pansy lets out a small dry laugh and takes another swig of beer. "More like dreamed, really."

The word goes clean through my chest. My throat goes dry. I take a swig of beer to hide the wave of nausea rolling over me like the tide. 

"What do you mean?" I ask once I'm almost certain my voice won't shake. 

"Well, on the outside… In the… real world… I was having dinner parties with that arsehole Bletchley and all his bigoted friend, and I was getting engaged, and…" Pansy's voice breaks. I feel sick at the thought of everything she's not telling us. 

"Well, anyway," she continues after a small silence and several large gulps of beer. "I said I didn't remember any of it when I came into your office. And that is because I don't think my mind was there. I think it might only have been my body that was doing all those things while my consciousness…"

Her voice breaks. It's hard for her, talking about it. I can only imagine how much. Her eyes are filled with tears and something else, too. Something much colder, more akin to rage or strength or determination. 

"I've had… memories. Flashes. Of what I thought was happening. Of where my consciousness was. It’s all fuzzy, still. I... I remember this cottage. It’s where I lived—where I thought I lived.” 

Pansy pinches the bridge of her nose with red-nailed fingers and is quiet for a while. Then, she takes a sharp breath and a large sip of beer and continues:

“It was beautiful, there. Like everything was somehow… more. More alive. More real. The fields were covered in wildflowers in the spring, and the trees turned red and gold on the first day of autumn. There was never a raindrop in summer, and Christmas was always white with snow. And it…” Pansy pauses again, her eyes glazing over for an instant. 

“It was so damn beautiful, and it was so damn not real, and I loved it there.” Pansy’s voice breaks at that. “I loved it there,” she repeats, voice barely above a whisper. I am frozen in my seat. I remind myself to breathe. Pansy wipes roughly at her eyes and takes another sip of beer before putting the empty bottle down on the coffee table. Luna strokes her knee with gentle fingers and doesn’t say a thing.

“You know the thing I loved most about it, Potter? You know the thing that made it really feel like home?” Pansy asks, her voice sob-strangled and pain-rough.

I shake my head.

“Luna was there too. She lived in that cottage. She picked flowers and apples in those fields. In summer, we went bathing in the sea. We had an entire life there, together. I wore her ring. I fell asleep curled up against her and we had endless squabbles about my hair. She always wanted to braid it, cover it in flowers, make it as beautiful as me, she said, and I—” 

Pansy starts crying in earnest halfway through that sentence and sobs shake her thin shoulders so bad she can’t finish it. Hermione waves a cooling charm over an unopened bottle and holds it out to her. 

“I never had the patience for it,” Pansy finishes in a broken whisper as Luna grabs the bottle, opens it with the fastening on her purple corduroy dungarees, and passes it to Pansy. Pansy accepts it, letting her fingers brush over Luna’s for an instant before taking a large gulp of the cold beer.

“It’s been really hard,” she admits after having swallowed. “I had an entire life with her there, and then, I wake up, and she thinks I’ve gone and abandoned her two years ago. On top of everything else that happened, everything that Bletchley and my father…”

“We’ve been talking through it,” Luna chimes in, quietly. “It’s been difficult for both of us, but sometimes life’s not easy at all, and what can we do but live on all the same?”

Hermione nods gravely. Ron looks intently at the floor with tear bright eyes. Silence stretches between us as we all ponder Luna’s words and the reality of Pansy’s experience. I notice my own fingers are aching from gripping my bottle so tightly, my entire body is tense. Everything she’s just described—the wildflowers and the trees, the perfect seasons and the feeling that the dream is somehow more real than reality itself—is exactly how my own dreams felt, the ones where Draco held me under cottony skies and kissed me with the waves lapping at our feet. I try not to think that I too will never have that for real. I try not to think that I too have lost an entire life that could have been, under different circumstances. I dig my teeth into the inside of my cheek until my tongue tastes of copper and tears are no longer sitting heavy and hot behind my eyes.

“I promise we’ll get whoever is responsible for this, Pansy,” Ron says after a while, his voice quiet and low, “I know it doesn’t make anything better, I know it doesn’t make what you experienced any less horrific but still. I promise we’ll get them, and I promise we’ll put an end to it all, and I promise no one else will ever have to go through it.”

“And you know where to find us,” Hermione adds. “You’re safe here. You know whatever you need, we’ll do our best to provide.”

Luna reaches her arm around Pansy’s shoulder and presses her against her side.

“You haven’t lost me either. Not really,” she whispers into her hair, “we’re just in different timelines for a while, and you need to hold still until I can catch up with you.”

Pansy buries her face in her hands at those words, and sobs overtake her again.

“I think we’ll excuse ourselves,” Luna says softly, her arm still around Pansy’s shoulders. “It’s been a long night. It’s been a long two weeks, really.”

As I watch Luna and Pansy tread into the fireplace, after goodbyes have been said, I notice Luna reaching for Pansy’s hand and holding it tightly in hers. 

It makes me feel unreasonably envious.

We’re quiet for a while after they leave. Hermione drinks her beer too fast, and Ron stares at the wall. There are a lot of messed-up cases in our line of work, but not like this—never like this. It’s always cleaner, less personal, in the interview room. It’s always a puzzle to solve, it’s always a task or a challenge. We’re not used to being confronted with the victim’s pain, with the consequences of the crime. Ron breaks the silence first.

“We need to find the bastard.”

There is a weight in his voice that belies his quiet tone. He’s enraged and determined. I love him for it—for his unrelenting, unwavering commitment to what is right, no matter the cost.

“Let’s go over what you already have.” Hermione has gotten several sheets of parchment and her treasured multi-quill, a birthday present from Ginny that lets her write in different colours and highlight all the most important bits.

Ron talks her through Woodbridge, his ministry benefits and his empty residence. She writes down more words than leave Ron’s mouth. Highlights about half. Circle a few others too. When Ron pauses, she ties her hair back into a messy bun that she secures with her wand, a wild light in her eyes.

I tell her about Daphne, about Bole and Bletchley. The coffee table isn’t large enough for the crazy mind map she’s scribbling over all of four sheets of parchment so she colonises the floor. When Ron and I are finally done bringing her up to speed, there is a trail of frantic, rainbow coloured notes spreading from the entrance of the kitchen to the coffee table. 

And we still don’t have a lead.

“We can’t just wait for the background checks on Bole and Bletchley to come back,” Ron mutters restlessly pacing the length of the living room rug. “We both know they’ll come back clean because those rich fuckers know exactly who to pay off to keep all their little criminal ‘mistakes’ off their records.”

“There has to be a solution. There has to be. We just need to find it.” Hermione is chewing the end of her quill and frantically re-reading her notes.

I am silent for a while. I know what our next step should be, and I don’t know that I am ready for it yet. But they both look so pained, so desperate to find something, to have a lead and make all the wrongs right that the words fall from my tongue before I can think better of it.

“We need to look into Draco’s death.”

They both turn to look at me in silence. Ron looks worried. Hermione just looks frustrated.

“Oh, Harry,” she says softly, “not this again.”

“I know what it sounds like, but just trust me on this one.”

“We’d like to trust you.” Ron slumps into an armchair and takes a deep breath. “But don’t you remember after Draco’s funeral? All the times you insisted he wasn’t really dead? That it was just a trick? That he was really being kidnapped by his enemies and we needed to act?”

“And, Harry, you stopped eating. You stopped sleeping. Robards had to threaten to kick you off the force at one point. Everything you said or did or even thought about—it all revolved around Draco, and you were willing to let your entire life go to waste. I’m not living through that again.” Hermione’s eyes are pleading, full of tears and pain and fear. 

“I know I did. I know. And we talked about it. It was the first death since the war and it hit me harder than it should have,” I lie. It’s a reasonable explanation, and one they’ve both accepted as true. “This is different.”

They both look at me. Uncomfortable. Unconvinced.

“Look, Ron,” I plead, “you remember when I said we needed to bring Daphne in? I was right, wasn’t I? Please. You need to trust me on this one, please.”

Ron takes a deep breath.

“It’d help if you told us how you knew that, mate. What you have on Malfoy.”

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. The words get caught on my ribs, they stay stuck inside my throat. I can’t say them. Not now that I know once the dreams stop, I’ll lose Draco for good. Not when every cell on the surface of my skin, every drop of my blood, every splinter of my bones is still vibrating with his touch, and his kiss, and how much I want it to happen again (and again and again.) I bury my face in my hands and shake my head. One more kiss, I promise myself. One more kiss, one more dream—and then I’ll tell them. And then I’ll move on for good, forget Draco and start living. 

“You’ve always had this fascination with Malfoy,” Hermione says after a while, “you followed him everywhere at Hogwarts. You cut out the newspaper articles of all the Malfoy trials.”

“Mate, honestly, that thing where you’d keep the clippings on your bedroom wall? We were all freaked out about it. It was a bloody shrine to Malfoy, and none of us even knew what to do about it.”

“And we figured you needed something to hold on to. We know how it felt, being caught in that war. We were there too, you know?” Hermione’s voice is soft and laced with pain. I know it’s not been easier for her than it was for me. I know she was right alongside me every step of the way, left her precious studies to become a fugitive, living in a forest with two scared boys and a horcrux. “We know Malfoy meant something to you. And I can only imagine what, really. He’s a splash of grey in a world that’s too often described as black or white. He’s the proof you can be a bit of a bigoted arse, you can do some really awful things, and still make the right decisions when push comes to shove.”

“We understand that it was easier to let grief overcome you when he died,” Ron continues. “When Fred died, I didn’t feel anything for days. Dad cried over everything, and mum couldn’t even get out of bed. But I couldn’t feel anything—my own brother died, and I couldn’t even feel sad. And it’s so messed up, it really is. I cried when Dobby died, you know. I couldn’t sleep for a week after Dumbledore was killed. I grieved for Sirius and Cedric and I didn’t even know them that well.” A tear rolls down Ron’s cheek. From where she’s sitting on the floor, Hermione reaches up and takes his hand. “And when it finally hit me that I’d never see my older brother again—when it finally hit me that my whole entire life would never be the same without him there, I realised that grieving meant I needed to make it all real. That grieving meant I needed to go through that awful, unending mountain of pain and find a way to make it to the other side.” He sighs and wipes at his eyes with his free hand. “I don’t think you’ve done that yet. Not for anyone who died in the battle of Hogwarts. Not for Lupin or for Tonks. Not for Snape either.”

“I know,” I answer because it’s true. I haven’t had the strength to give in to the pain, to let it overwhelm me. I’m frozen in fear at the idea of giving up the precarious kind of stability I’ve managed to establish in my life. I’m half convinced that amount of hurt might maim me, or kill me. That I wouldn’t make it through alive.

“I know,” I whisper again because what else can I say? I’m miserable and overwhelmed by the thought that, after everything, I still need to put myself through hell to get a chance at being happy. I’m not even convinced that it’ll be worth it. I draw my knees to my chest, and we all sit in a sad sort of silence for a while.

“If I look into Draco’s death,” Hermione says carefully, a strange look in her soft brown eyes, “If I find out for you what happened and how he died, would it help you to let go?”

I nod. I know I need to stop living my life through dreams of him. I need to stop falling in love with someone I can never have, someone who’s been dead for years. Someone who’ll never love me back. I know it’s unhealthy. I know it’ll never make me happy. Even if it’s the best thing I have right now.

Hermione hugs me. She’s soft and warm and reassuring. After a few seconds, Ron hugs the both of us too, and we stay in each other’s arms for longer than we’d care to admit.

“We’re always there,” Ron says.

“I know,” I whisper through the soft mass of Hermione’s hair.

That night, I fall asleep in my bed and no dream crawls into my sleep. They do not come the next day either, or the day after that. 

Then, when I’ve almost convinced myself they’ve gone for good, I dream again.


	6. Draco, Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm eternally grateful to the lovely [Emma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheous87) who cheered me on, and wrote with me, and picked out all my mistakes. 
> 
> To the discord channel who knows this chapter under the delightful title of "ghost porn": thank you for making me laugh and giving me motivation to do this.
> 
> Please note that this chapter is explicit. If that's not your thing, you can skip to/wait for the next chapter.

The trees are tall here, their crowns reaching into the blue-grey fog, their branches all weighed down with humidity and vines. The floor under Harry’s feet is moss-soft. Leaf-crisp. It is autumn and everything has turned into taxidermy fireworks of reds and golds.

Harry walks.

The trees open for him, close behind him. The path winds and turns and doesn’t go anywhere.

Still, Harry walks.

Harry knew those trees when he was a boy. Harry feared their twisted trunks and gnarled branches when it was still the Forbidden Forest, dark and gloomy and full of danger. He reaches out and touches the rough, grey bark. There is nothing of danger, now. The fog wraps around him, soft like a woollen blanket, tender like a mother’s embrace.

He feels at peace.

His feet slowly tread the forest floor, where there are soft-worn roots and autumn crocuses. He doesn’t want to disturb either. There is an eerie sort of calm, here, and Harry knows the forest wants him. Loves him. Harry does not speak the language of the wind rustling in the leaves, but he knows it whispers reassurance in his hair all the same.

There is a lake in the forest. Is it deep? It doesn’t matter. It is bottle-green and sunlight kisses it’s calm surface. Harry crouches down, plunges his fingers in the cold, clear waters. The lake licks at his skin like a gentle lover. Harry closes his eyes and exhales.

“Harry.”

The word is whispered in a language Harry understands. The wind hasn’t spoken it, nor the lake, nor the leaves crunching underfoot.

“Harry.”

Harry stands up. Turns around. His chest is filled with fog, warm and soft. He smiles.

Draco smiles back.

They’re in each other’s arms. How did this happen? It doesn’t matter. Draco’s skin is fire-soft; Draco’s hair is ember-bright. The fog in Harry’s chest turns to woodsmoke as Draco trails a warm tongue on the side of his jaw.

“Harry.” Draco’s breath leaves a burn-humid trail on Harry’s collarbones. And Harry—falls apart in Draco’s arms.

“I want you,” Draco whispers against the shell of Harry’s ear, fisting rough-pull hands in his hair. And everything inside Harry’s chest melts like wax with the warmth of Draco’s voice, dripping softly behind his ribs and pooling in the pit of his stomach. His vision swims. He’s pinned against a tree, and there is a thigh between his legs, and he’s entirely certain he’ll come without as much as a hand on him.

“Yes.” Harry’s voice is sob-strangled and bark-rough. He knows he’ll regret it as soon as the word spills from his lips, but he’s too far gone to fight. “Yes,” he whispers again against Draco’s collarbone, delirious with want and love and grief.

Draco lets out a soft little whine, the kind that sounds exalted and anxious and lightning-struck all at once.

And Harry knows he’ll never be the same again, never be alright again. He knows he should push Draco away. He knows he should keep his shirt on, should keep his head on his shoulders and his heart inside his chest because it’ll ruin him, the burn-shock contact of Draco’s skin on his. It’ll gut him like a fish and turn him inside out.

“I want you,” he whispers all the same. And it is all he ever wanted—this, just this. Draco and him and the trees above their heads, this hushed-soft intimacy of brokenness and desire. It’s all he’s ever wanted, it’s everything he thought about when he came into his own hand in the darkness of his room, when he cried into his pillow at night—and it’s finally happening.

(Finally.)

(Finally.)

Draco’s opening the buttons on Harry’s shirt with trembling fingers, and Harry can’t look. He can’t look—he’ll catch fire if he does, he’ll combust and burn with blackened flesh and charred-chalk bones.

“Harry.”

Draco’s voice is soft like snow and cracked like frost-fissured soil.

The shirt falls to the ground.

Eyes turned to the heavens above, Harry catches fire all the same. He grips at the trunk with both hands because his legs stop working all of a sudden. The bark scratches dots and lines onto his back as Draco’s tongue traces warm swirls around his left nipple. Everything in Harry’s chest has turned into pure electricity. Raw. Crackling. Harry’s hands fly from the trunk and to the heavy wool of Draco’s robes, pushing it off shoulders and arms until it falls on the leaf-covered ground. Draco’s buttons are smooth and hard. Draco’s flesh is warm and firm, as Harry’s greedy fingers learn every inch of it by heart (and Harry’s greedy tongue, and Harry’s greedy heart.)

“Can I?” Draco asks, tugging at the band of Harry’s trousers. The lightning in Harry’s chest spreads to his limbs and throat and mouth. He does not give a coherent answer. He throws his head back, instead and whispers Draco’s name like a mantra or a prayer until Draco’s fingers are on him, gentle and tender and reverent. It is pitiful, how broken he sounds. How needy. How hollow. He tries to keep the desire behind the vault of his ribs, but it is too bright, too vast, and entirely too much. There is not enough space in Harry’s lightning-storm body to hold in exactly how much he wants Draco in that instant, how much he craves his ruinous touch, his match-stick gaze. He can’t move. He can’t. So he stands still, leaning against the bark. Want-frozen. Shame-cheeked. 

Draco’s fingers map him, at first, with soft-trace fingertips. They learn all the curves and crooks of him, they classify and catalogue the colours and the texture of the skin, and only when they have explored him entirely, only when they have discovered every last secret spot, does Draco palm his cock in earnest and start stroking, in gentle, rhythmic motion. Whimpers and moans spill from Harry’s mouth like a strand of pearls or a waterfall. The sensation is blinding and deafening, pleasure courses like molten metal in Harry’s veins, curls into his every bone. It feels better than any sensation has the right to, Draco’s fingers on him, Draco’s soft lips kissing his side and whispering praise into his hip bone. ( _You’re so gorgeous, Harry, so bloody gorgeous_ and _I’m going to make you feel so good, Harry_ and _You have no idea how much I want this. How much I want you. How long I’ve wanted you for._ )

There are tears streaming on Harry’s cheeks by the time the soft wetness of Draco’s mouth closes around him. How did they get there? It doesn’t matter. It only matters that Draco is beautiful, and beautiful, and touching him in ways he never dared to hope.

(Because this is the thing about hope: it’s bright and warm and more dangerous than anything. It’s a million flint-firework sparks, and Harry’s made entirely of tinder and dry straw, and he’s been building fireproof walls of indifference and distance around his petroleum-puddle heart for longer than he remembers.)

Draco hums and moans around him, and Harry turns into the earth or the sky, something vast and impossible and all-encompassing. Everything about him is burning, burning, burning under Draco’s pleasure-spit touch. His nerve endings light up like sparks. He turns into a constellation. He can’t think. He can’t breathe. There’s nothing else here but him, and Draco, and the natural-disaster pleasure unfurling in his chest. (A flood. A forest fire. A hurricane or an earthquake.) He’s going to come. He’s going to come with Draco touching him, stroking him, sucking him—and then it’ll be over, he remembers. 

Because he promised, did he? 

He promised. 

One last kiss, he told himself. One last time.

(It can’t be over. It can never be over. Harry needs this moment to last forever like he needs water or oxygen.)

Harry pulls Draco to his feet, gently.

“I want you inside me,” he whispers into the crook of Draco’s neck as his roughshod fingers work open Draco’s trousers. There is something, dancing at the back of Draco’s eyes when Harry leans in to kiss him. Something hotter than the sun and sharper than flint. (Something dangerous and bright, like fire or hope or desire.) When they kiss, it’s urgent and rough, and the lightning in Harry’s chest spills out entirely, in bright-burn arcs. Harry places a careful hand between Draco’s legs, stroking at the hardness through the fabric with infinite reverence. It steals his breath from him, that Draco wants him. 

(How much Draco wants him.)

“Come, lie down for me, love.”

Harry feels strong hands at his shoulders, guiding him gently towards the ground. Under his naked back: Draco’s heavy wool robes. Scattered in his hair: yellow-crackle leaves. Hanging about his head: the fog-cotton skies. And all around him, oh, all around him: Draco. Draco. Draco.

“I’ll make you feel so good, love. Just you wait, darling. Just you wait. I’m going to make you feel so good.”

There’s Draco’s naked skin on his, Draco’s soft-hard erection against his belly, Draco’s warm-solid thigh against his groin, and this—this is when Harry knows it’s really happening. They’re going to make love there, on the forest floor, and how can he ever survive this? How can he ever remember how to be alive again now that he’s a lightning storm, now that he’s forest fire and a tidal wave and an avalanche?

(But here is the thing about Harry: he’s been careful for longer than he remembers. He’s been building walls and wearing insolence like armour ever since he was old enough to talk. He’s been hiding all his life, and the bone-tiredness of it is unbearably heavy, now. Unbearably lonely, too. And it’s felt the opposite of lonely, this whole disaster of a thing. It felt good, Harry realises, falling in love with a ghost by the seaside. It feels good catching fire under the hands of a dead man in the stillness of an October-rust forest. He’s not entirely certain that he wants to survive it at all.)

Draco shifts, and Harry’s suddenly on top of him, and Draco’s fingers are caressing his back, dipping down the cleft of his arse, and it’s everything Harry wants. Moans escape from his lips as he writhes against Draco, desperate for more friction between them.

Draco’s clever fingers work him open gently ( _yes, love, moan for me. That’s good, love. You’re doing well. You’re doing so well_ ), and Harry’s armour cracks. Then, Draco goes and whispers praise onto the skin of his shoulder ( _You’re gorgeous, love_ and _you’re so beautiful, you have no idea_ and _you have no idea how long I’ve loved you for, Harry_ . _You have no idea how much I’ve wanted you_.) 

Everything that was holding Harry together shatters suddenly. Words lose their meaning entirely. (And time. And reality.) There is only Draco—Draco’s body pinned under him, Draco’s fingers inside him, Draco’s voice all around him.”

“I love you,” Harry manages. “I love you so much I can’t sleep some nights. I love you so much I can’t breathe or think straight. You’re everything that I want. You’re everything, Draco. You’re everything, and I never want to let you go.”

“You don’t have to, love. I’m here. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here.” Draco slowly shifts Harry onto his back, spilling kisses and warm words of reassurance over his skin, licking at his nipples and trailing down, down, down over his sternum and navel and between his legs.

Harry’s whimpering helplessly now, he’s overflowing entirely with words and feelings and want, _yes_ and _Draco_ and _oh fuck_ spilling from his lips unbidden. He does not hold back. He does not try to protect himself. He gives himself entirely to Draco, and it’s reckless, and it’s glorious. And it’ll hurt him, oh it’ll ruin him entirely, it’ll hollow him out and it’ll burn him to the ground. By the time Draco’s done with him, he knows, he’ll be a shell of a human being, with sea-glass bones and armenian-paper skin, brittle and thin. Still, when Draco positions himself at the entrance of him, Harry fists his hands into his starlight hair and gazes into his storm-grey eyes, and whispers, “I want you. I want you. I want you.”

Draco pushes inside, and the entire world melts away until there is only the sensation inside Harry, pulsating and warm and entirely overpowering. Draco stills, his cock entirely sheathed inside Harry, and Harry shuts his eyes, covers them with white-jointed fingers pressing against his eyelids because it’s too much, that feeling. It’s too much for him to bear, too much for his body to contain. Draco pries them away gently.

“I want to see you. Please, I want to see you,” he pleads, molten-metal eyes heavy-hot and resting on Harry’s skin.

He moves, then, just a little. Harry whimpers and grabs Draco’s wrists, kisses the palms of his hands and sucks his fingers. He moves again, and again, and again. The motions slow and gentle but unrelenting like a rising tide or a setting sun.

“You feel so good, Harry. You feel so good. Do you like this? Does this feel good? Tell me what you want, Harry. Tell me. You can have it all. Anything you like. Anything at all. Tell me.”

Harry does not answer because he’s forgotten how words work. There is the sun inside his chest, glowing bright and warm, and he’s entirely sure he’s combusted already and risen like a phoenix from the ashes. He throws his head back and grabs handfuls of leaves from the forest floor as if he’d find eternity or time there. As if he could hold the seconds between his fingers, ball his fists tight and stop them from escaping, as if he could make the moment stretch and stretch and stretch until the entire universe caught fire and collapsed on itself, and then longer still, until every star turned silent and dark, until galaxies died and were born again.

Draco’s hand, freed from Harry’s mouth, finds its way to his cock and starts stroking. Draco’s motions are quicker now, more frantic, and he’s babbling in earnest. And Harry loves him, Harry loves him, Harry loves him.

“Slow,” he whispers against Draco’s neck. “I want to savour every last piece of you.”

“Yes.” Draco’s voice is rough as pumice and sweet as honey as he answers. “Anything you want, love. Anything at all,” he adds as his motions become slow as treacle dripping from a spoon. His hand on Harry’s cock slows too, coaxing every feeling of pleasure out of Harry’s chest and onto Harry’s skin.

“I love you,” Harry tells him, again and again and again with every rhythmic trust of his hip.

“I know, love. I know you do. It’s fine, love, we’re together now. We’re together now.”

They make love, slow and gentle on the forest floor. The trees above them lay out blankets of gold leaves below their backs and the fog wraps them in thick, warm air. Close by, the lake stretches its sparkle-green water, and echoes their cries and moans, too. And for a while, it is perfect. But it cannot last, for pleasure builds in Harry’s chest like a pharaoh’s snake—growing, burning, twisting and turning and filling up every single inch of it, until Harry is entirely certain there is no space left in his body at all that is not filled to the brim with love and light and the unbearable feeling of Draco’s hands on him.

He looses control then, grabs at Draco with lust-clench hands, moves his hips to meet Draco’s thrusts, faster and faster and faster until he can’t think anymore, until everything is blinding and burning and not enough, still not enough, never enough. And he begs him for more and Draco grabs the side of his head, and kisses the centre of his mouth, and calls him _love_ and _darling_ and _beautifulbeautifulbeautiful._ Draco’s voice is breathy and high, shattered by pleasure, by his own incommensurable want, and Harry can feel the desire in his bones. There’s Draco’s hand on his cock, and there’s Draco’s hair in his hands and Draco’s hands on his face, and fireworks erupt inside Harry’s chest as he comes with Draco’s name on his lips.

(“Oh, Draco, oh love, oh love.”)

And then, Draco’s coming too, and Harry is holding him through his orgasm, and kissing his collarbone, and runs soft hands down his back, and—

It is gone.

The forest disappears, and the lake, and the sky. And Draco, too, of course, and that’s the worst loss of it all.


	7. Ginny Weasley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As always, all my gratitude goes to [Orpheus87](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheous87/works) for being lovely and betaing this chapter so very quickly after it took me several months to write.

I wake up on the cold floor, tangled in my sheets and soaked in sweat. Strong waves of nausea roll over me as I try to remember how to breathe. Then, everything comes rushing back: the embrace of the forest. The softness of Draco’s skin. The way he called me “love”. The way happiness shone like a sun inside my skin. I sick up all over the floor.

“Fuck,” I say out loud in the darkness of my bedroom.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” I strew the word behind me like pebbles as I stumble down the hall and into the living room.

My chest feels tight and my head heavy. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to think. It hurts to exist in a reality where Draco’s body is not warm and soft and pliable against mine (is in a grave somewhere, in the ground somewhere, is cold and stiff and will never be whole again.)

I go straight for the bottle of firewhisky. 

My shaking fingers fumble with the screw cap. When I finally manage to get it open, I take a swig straight from the bottle. 

Then, fingers tight on the bottleneck, I start crying.

Minutes pass like this. Hours, perhaps. My existence sits like a stone on my lungs, loss and grief fill my mouth, astringent and suffocating like morsels of unripe quince. Draco’s absence is burning holes into my chest, and there is nothing I can do.

Halfway through the bottle, I realise that I’ve made love for the first time in my entire life in that forest. I’ve let another human love me and touch me and breach me, and it should feel momentous and warm, it really should. 

(It doesn’t.) 

(It doesn’t.) 

(It feels desperate and devastatingly lonely.)

I let out a dry laugh that echoes in the empty darkness of the room. Does it count as losing one’s virginity, I muse, if it happened in a dream and no one can prove it was real? I haven’t taken the time to light the candles. As the sound of my laughter dies out, the thought that nothing I can do will ever bring Draco back hits me square in the chest. It unsettles all the firewhisky burning holes in my stomach and nausea wrings my body again.

I can’t do this, I realise as I vanish the contents of my stomach from the hardwood floor. I can’t continue to live in dreams and pretend it doesn’t break me clean in half to lose Draco anew every night. 

My fingers find the floo powder almost unbidden as I lean on to the chimney to stop the alcohol from pulling the floor from under my feet. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I’ve got nothing else to lose, I remind myself. I’m half-blind with grief already, half-mad with the loss of something I never truly had. I whisper Ron and Hermione’s address as I throw a handful of glittering powder into the flames and I stumble through.

* * *

Ron’s in the kitchen when I fall, face down, on the living room carpet. He turns around, a startled look on his face. 

"Fuck, mate, are you alright?" he asks when he recognises me. 

I start crying again.

“Shit, Harry, come here,” he says and pulls me into a hug. His embrace is warm and solid. I don’t stop crying. He doesn’t stop holding me.

I lose sense of time as Ron’s hands rub circles on my back and we sit uncomfortably on the shaggy carpet in front of the hearth, the silence of the room only broken by my sobs and Ron’s soft reassurances that it will be okay, it will all be okay.

“Hermione made you some tea,” Ron says when I run out of tears. “It’ll do you good. Come on.”

I try to get up, but the firewhiskey turns the floor to liquid and I lose my balance.

“Harry, love, you’re too drunk for this.” Hermione’s voice is soft as she crouches beside me, but the sobering charms she casts fill my stomach with steel wool and my head with dry ice. Nausea seizes me again, but before I can be sick for the third time of the morning, I feel her stomach-soothing charms unfurl like a warm flower behind my ribs.

“Thanks,” I say, pushing myself up.

“No problem.” Hermione squeezes my arm gently. I know it’s her way of letting me know she’s here for me too. I smile weakly at her.

We end up sitting at the kitchen island, all three of us, with mugs of steaming breakfast tea in front of us. The silence is heavy and awkward, and I have no idea how to break it. I take a sip of tea. It burns my tongue. In a twisted kind of way, the pain soothes me, reminds me how to have a sensation that is not unending grief or unbearable loss.

“We’ve known you weren’t doing okay for a long time. We’re happy you’ve finally decided to come to us with whatever’s wrong.”

It is Hermione who breaks the silence because of course, it is. Out of the three of us, she’s always been the one who had the least patience for things not moving forward. Her voice is steady and calm, and I can hear in her tone the unspoken promise that whatever problem, whatever challenge I throw at her? She’ll solve it. It fills me with gratitude.

“I’ve just slept with Draco Malfoy,” I say. 

It is not the beginning, but the words escape me. I realise I don’t know how to tell this story. It’s lived behind my ribs for so long; I kept it under my tongue like a secret or a gold coin for months.

“Okay,” Hermione says like I’m making sense. Then: “When was that, and how did it happen?”

I hold on to the rationality of her like to a lifeline and breathe deeply. Ron reaches for my hand. His skin is warm and solid and real. I squeeze his fingers. 

“It started with Pansy,” I say. “When she came into the office for the first time…”

I tell them about drinking the potion in Hawthorne’s Apothecary. I tell them about passing out, about the dreams. I tell them about the lavender fields and the cliff by the sea and the forest. I tell them about the lab too, about how Draco’s always there, never the same and always just out of reach. By the time I’ve talked them through everything, there are tears all over my cheeks and my entire body feels like it’s made out of stone or lead, out of something heavy and cold and entirely dead.

Hermione stands up and hugs me. I can smell the soft scent of her jasmine soap. Then, I notice the rich coconut of the conditioner she always slathers on her curls in a desperate attempt to tame them. When Ron joins the hug, he smells like Earl Grey tea and washing powder. 

I breathe in. 

And in that instant, I know I’ll be alright eventually. There’s a void in my chest, still, a sort of pulsating emptiness pulling at my ribs and when I close my eyes, they are dry and raw from crying, but something warm and soothing settles over me all the same, and I let it.

“Thank you for being honest,” Ron says when we break apart. He runs his hand through his hair and shoots me a small smile.

“I wish you’d felt like you could come to us with it before,” he continues after he’s sat down again. Our cups of tea have long grown cold but he wraps his fingers tightly around his all the same, his face serious and almost sad.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry. I trust you so much, both of you.”

I run my hand over my face. My fingers are ice cold and my cheeks are burning up.

“I’m happy you told us. I really am,” Ron continues. “That’s what really matters in the end, isn’t it? That you found your way to us with it. And whatever it is, we’ll work it out, Harry. I promise. Whatever it is, it’ll be alright.”

I smile at him, weakly. I am relieved this whole mess is out in the open, at last. It feels good, not being alone. 

I hear a soft whisper as Hermione spells the kettle warm again. I turn to look at her. She pointedly doesn’t look at me, her mouth pulled in a little worried line. I can’t tell what she is thinking and it unsettles something deep down in my stomach.

“Harry,” she says when there is hot tea in all three of our cups again. She pauses. Takes a deep breath and rubs the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “Look, there’s no easy way to say this.”

I let out a dry little laugh. It seems ridiculous that she’d want to spare me now, when I’ve lost the man I love all over again and spent several hours crying on the floor. Ron reaches out and takes my hand again.

“I’ve pulled Draco’s file.” Hermione pauses. She takes a deep breath again. “I didn’t think there’d be anything there. I thought you were just obsessing over his death because the war has been so hard on you and you’ve lost so much... I thought this was just your way of externalising the feelings, but I thought if I could tell you why and how he died, if we could maybe visit his grave, if you could grieve… I thought it would be good for you, you know? Healthy?”

At the mention of Draco’s name, my heart somehow gets stuck in my throat. I can hardly swallow around it. I can barely breathe. I bite my lip and nod wordlessly. She goes on:

“The archivist owed me a favour so I had him pull the file. I figured it’d be with the other closed cases, but when he gave me the folder, it didn’t have an Auror case number on it. I knew immediately it was one of ours… I recognised the code for it. You know I was the one to propose specific classification for different types of cases when I first started at the Ministry… And well, it is really the only way to do things right...”

“Hermione. Focus.” 

Ron’s voice is warm but there’s a warning behind the soft words. I realise he knows what she’s about to tell me. I realise he knows she’s afraid to say it, too.

“Hermione,” I say with what I hope is a half-convincing smile, “I brought down a dark wizard, remember? I run after bad guys and get curses shot at me at for a living. Whatever was in that file, I promise I can take it.”

Despite my bravado, I can feel fear seeping, cold and dark, through my skin and settling in my bones like permafrost because the truth is that I’m not sure her words won’t be all it takes to shatter me into a million of small glass-like shards.

“Yes.” She inhales. Exhales. Attempts a smile: it looks like a grimace. “Yes. Of course, you can.”

She swallows.

“The thing is, Draco Malfoy’s file is classified under ‘mysterious disappearances’.”

She pauses. On her face, her concern is plainly painted. I can tell she’s trying to assess how I’m taking the news. I can tell she’s afraid of hurting me, of breaking me. Of giving me unfounded hopes, perhaps. Still, she continues :

“Not ‘missing person’, Harry. Not ‘unsolved death’. ‘Disappearance’. As far as I can tell, he was in the department of mysteries when it happened. Several people saw him walking into a room, and there’s no way he could have gotten out, but when they opened a door, he wasn’t there anymore. There was no body. No blood. They found his wand on the floor, it hadn’t cast a single defensive spell. No one has seen him since.”

“He’s…” The words are thick as treacle upon my tongue. The air feels sticky and cloying as cotton candy in my lung. “How?” I manage.

I hear her words ringing in my ears. Around me, the world starts spinning madly. A wild hope sparks in my chest, and I daren’t trust it quite yet. Hermione doesn’t notice, she’s speaking quickly now, like she opened the floodgates of truth and all the words came rushing out.

“The file didn’t go into a lot of detail. I didn’t know, but he apparently worked with us in some capacity as a consultant. I think it might have been potions because you said he had a lab in some of your dreams, but it didn’t say so in the file. Anyway, he came into the department on the day he disappeared. It was ten at night and, from what I understand, the Ministry would normally have been empty, but a bunch of employees were working late that day.”

Hermione’s voice reaches my ears distorted and slowed, as though underwater. Not dead, my heart beats wildly against my ribs. Not dead. Not dead. It’s all I can hear.

“Something about a spell gone wrong that had vanished the floor between the time room and the cafeteria,” I hear Hermione explain. I can’t focus my eyes on her. Suddenly, everything in the room feels far away and intangible. “So they all saw him go into a room and the door close behind him. Then, the spell damage to the floor spread and there was a gaping hole in the entire corridor, and right in front of the room Draco had walked into.”

Every word is fainter, more diffuse. Harder to understand beneath the deafening sound of my heart, of my blood in my ears.

“There was no way he could have gotten out, and you know the Ministry is warded against…”

I don’t hear the end of that sentence. Everything turns to black and I pass out.

* * *

There is nothing here. No floor, no walls, only the dark around me. When I try to call out, I can’t even hear my voice. I run my hands over my face. I can’t feel a thing. 

I scream.

Nothing.

It’s fucking fitting, isn’t it? I’ve lost everything now. I’ve lost the ability to stay awake and I’ve lost the ability to sleep. I’ve lost Draco, and I’ve lost the dreams, and I’ve lost everything else too. I won the war and lost myself somewhere between the sacrifice and the body count. Somewhere between keeping face and keeping on. 

The tears won’t come. I can’t feel my eyes.

I let myself fall to the floor, but there is no floor, so I keep falling, and falling, and falling. And as I fall, I let myself mourn everything I’ve lost, finally.

I let myself grieve.

* * *

I wake up to the bright light of afternoon in a room that isn’t mine. I wonder where I am, then when I figure it out, I wonder how long I’ve slept.

I slowly step out of bed. I am wearing one of Ron’s old t-shirts and my underwear. Every single muscle in my body screams as I move. I give up on trying to find my trousers. Ron and Hermione are probably both at work, I figure. And even if they aren’t, it’s nothing they haven’t seen before.

I open the door. The flat is silent. I need coffee, I decide. I pretend it’ll fill the crushing sense of emptiness filling my chest like a hornet nest.

As I enter the kitchen, I can see Ginny lounging on the sofa, her beautiful hair spilling almost to the floor. She’s wearing an old flannel shirt and reading a quidditch magazine and shoots me her brightest smile.

“Hey, sleeping beauty.”

“Coffee,” I mutter.

She follows me into the kitchen.

“Make it two,” she says as she sits at the island counter. “Would you believe I’ve been woken up before eleven on the day after a match to come and babysit my sad sack ex-boyfriend? I’ve done more to deserve that coffee than you have.”

And there she is. I smile. She never takes gloves with me. Here I am, grieving a man I only ever had in dreams, but loved more than life itself. I am heavy and slow, with unbearable sadness clinging to my eyelashes and loss sitting like ashes on my tongue, yet she’s herself still, bright and bold and cutting. 

I’m grateful for it. 

She’s all that kept me sane, after the war, with her unending willingness to laugh at me, and her capacity to see through the tragedy narrative and into the core of me. 

“Wow, they must have been really desperate if they called you, the world’s least tactful person, to come and look after me,” I say instead of telling her I love her.

She punches my shoulder. I punch her back and we sit in silence as I make coffee.

“I need to thank you for what you’ve done for Luna,” she says as we sit on the sofa with steaming cups on our hands. “How you’re investigating this.”

I’d almost forgotten the case. I’d almost forgotten there existed a real life outside of the slow light of the forest, outside of lingering kisses and the warmth of another skin on mine. I take a sip of hot coffee. She continues:

“They deserve to be happy, Pansy and Luna. They deserve a second chance and you’ve given them that, in a way. You believed Pansy immediately and it’s given her the courage to seek Luna out.”

And had she said any of that before today, I would have said some shit about how I’m just doing my job. Impersonal and guarded, with perfunctory smiles and the secret of Draco in my chest.

I don’t answer anything at all. Instead, I concentrate on willing the tears back behind my eyes.

“You know,” Ginny continues, “I’ve never seen Luna as distraught as when Pansy broke up with her. She’s always been an odd one, she’s always been dancing to her own tune and people in school weren’t always kind with her, but she always used to take it with a smile, like nothing really touched her. But when Pansy broke up with her, there was a hurt inside her. Something wild and sharp and angry like a tiger in a cage, and I was always worried for her.” She pauses. “She carried it with her, that hurt, until the very minute Pansy came back. Funny, isn’t it? How love works?”

“Yeah,” I finally manage in a broken voice. “Funny.”

“I can see the hurt in you too, you know. I’m frankly amazed no one else has called you out on it before, with your propensity for the dramatic. You have never once been subtle even for a second. They humour you too much, Ron and Hermione. Let you get away with all the stupid stuff you do, even when you really need someone to ask you what the fuck you think you’re doing. Especially then.” She shakes her head with a small laugh. Silky strands of hair spill all over her face. “Still,” she continues, her smile melting away from her face until her eyes are wide and worried, “I could tell my brother was happy you told him. He does notice when something’s wrong, you know?”

“I should have told him before.” My words are soft, filled with a quiet kind of regret. “I should never have gone and drunk that potion like an idiot in the first place.”

“I can see why you did, though. I would have done the same thing.”

She leans back into the couch and rests her head on the cushion. I put my coffee down and set my own head down on her shoulder. She slings her arm around me and pulls me close.

“Remember that time I jumped off my broom, at the world finals, because I knew I could catch the snitch if I did?” she asks.

“You spent all winter in hospital, that year. They had to regrow all your bones. Some of them twice because you wouldn’t stop moving long enough for the potion to work properly, you loon,” I laugh against the softness of her shirt.

“But we won. That’s my point. I jumped off my broom and broke all my bones and it didn’t matter because we won. We’re not that different, Harry. We’re always going to do the stupid stuff, the dangerous stuff, the reckless stuff. We’re always going to run headfirst into danger, we’re always going to live for the thrill of those precious few seconds of freefall. Nothing’s going to change that.”

“Yeah,” I breathe. “Yeah. I went through hell, you know. With Draco and the dreams. I’m going through hell, still, but you’re right. I don’t regret it. It was beautiful, in its own way. Like a burning house or an avalanche is beautiful.”

“I know, Harry,” she says into my hair. “And you’ll be okay, eventually, if you put in the work. I know Ron won’t pressure you into not being an idiot, but he’s worried. And honestly, so am I. We may have the same kind of impulse, but at least I have the common sense not to die. Like how I went to the hospital, after I jumped off my broom, instead of hiding in my room like an idiot I know.”

“You broke all your bones!” I interject.

“Yeah, but even so. What I’m trying to say is: we’re always going to do the stupid stuff, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be smart about it. You’ve still got that potion in you. You need to get checked. I’m serious, Harry. You need a healer, a good one, one you can trust to know the truth and run all the tests. No research has been done on the effects of throwing up on the floor as a cure to poisoning, and honestly, I’m not holding my breath as to its efficacy.”

“I’m scared,” I admit before I can stop myself. And I am. Scared to find out that I’ve poisoned myself and that it’s done real damage. Scared that I’ll have to live out an entire life all alone, too.

“I know you are, love. I know you are,” Ginny whispers, her head resting on top of mine and her hand rubbing my arm. “It’ll be okay. Eventually. If you stop being an idiot about it. You’ll be okay.”

“I’ll go see someone,” I finally say. “I’ll make it okay.”

We sit in silence for a long while after that. In my chest, a fragile kind of tenderness unfurls as I hold onto her warm, solid presence by my side.

When we finally move, the sun is hanging low in the sky and painting the walls in soft shades of rose and gold. Ginny stretches, lazy and feline, and informs me she needs to get to training.

“Be smart, okay?” she says, standing in front of the door with her broom in hand and a strange, lopsided smile on her face.

I don’t answer.

Instead, I find a quill and a piece of parchment that Hermione hasn’t entirely covered in writing, and I scribble a quick message.

_ I love you, _ I write. And:  _ Thank you for everything. _ And:  _ I’m going to see a healer. I’m going to make things okay. _

Then, I call out my home address and step into the floo.


	8. Theodore Nott

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my eternal gratitude goes to [Orpheus87](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheous87/pseuds/orpheous87) who took time out of her day on a very short notice to deal with all my typos and random commas, to help me be as vulgar as I wanted to be and to give me very good advice.
> 
> But this chapter also wouldn't be anywhere near as good without the intervention of [Amelior8or](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amelior8or/) who helped me understand where my scene went wrong and why I was stuck and who wrote me lengthy comments about foreshadowing and [Andithiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andithiel) who read this chapter as I was writing it and dutifully sat through several scenes more than once in all their different iterations as she reassured me it wasn't entirely rubbish and pointed out all the sentences that broke her.
> 
> All three of you, thank you. This fic would not be the same without you.

Grimmauld Place is dark and empty, and the loneliness of it sits heavy in my chest as soon as I’ve stepped foot on the old flagstone floor. I have no idea how I am going to make it through another night of not seeing Draco and I have no idea how I’ll survive seeing Draco again. I’m about seven coffees into not thinking about it when the Floo blares open.

“Harry, you need to come over. Now. Just drop everything and come over, okay?”

I step through the Floo immediately, only too happy at the prospect of delaying the inevitable moment I will need to fall asleep, coffee cup left sitting cold and forgotten on the kitchen table.

Something is seriously wrong. I notice it as soon as I’ve stepped into their living room. The air is tense and electric, Ron standing next to the fireplace with his shoulders hunched and a worried look on his face. Hermione pacing the length of the room with both hands pressed against her temples.

“What happened?” I ask because there’s no sense in asking if they’re alright when it’s so clear they’re not.

“Threats,” Ron says with a sigh as he runs a hand through his hair.

“No, Ron, that’s not it.” Hermione’s voice is tense. Shrill. I can tell she’s about to break. “It’s not ‘threats’. That’s not even remotely the problem.”

She stops pacing and turns towards me. Fear and anger paint her face in equal measure. She looks me straight in the eye and unbuckles her belt.

“No, what happened is that some absolute _arsehole_ thought that my skin was an appropriate canvas for their piss poor threats,” she hisses as she unbuttons her jeans and pushes them down to her ankles. She tramples the fabric furiously until she’s standing in the middle of the living room in her socks and underwear, chin raised in defiance and eyes full of tears. I can make out words wrapping along her left thigh, creeping up, up, up and under the sensible white cotton panties. The skin is violently red around them, I can tell she’s been trying every spell she could to make them go away. I exhale, a long shaky breath.

“Oh, fuck, Hermione,” I say, because I can’t remember how words work.

“And I hate it,” she continues, ignoring me entirely. “I hate it. I hate the message whoever did this decided to write on my skin. I hate the fact that it’s written on my skin. I hate the fact that they’re making me carry this on my body.”

“I hate that I can’t seem to make the words go away,” she adds after a beat. Her voice is small and wet and radiating with pain.

I wrap her in my arms and hold her tight. I know what it’s like to have something foreign on your skin and something foreign in your head, and to not be able to feel entirely safe in your own body. I would have fired every spell I knew at my scar, back then, if I thought it might have helped.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry this awful thing is happening to you. It is not okay and you have every right to feel violated.”

“I’m sorry too, honey,” Ron says from behind me. I lift my head from Hermione’s curls to see him standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. “I should have understood it was about more than threats the first time you explained. I should have listened better.”

Hermione lets go of me to wrap an arm around him and pull him in the hug. I hold them both tight as Hermione’s breathing gradually grows calmer again, more regular.

“I’m glad you’re both here,” Hermione says when we break apart, wiping the wetness away from her cheeks with the sleeve of her jumper. “Now, I need you to help me figure out who did this, so I can make them pay.”

I look into her face. I don’t think she’s joking. She looks resolute and terrifying and whoever wrote threats on her skin? Has no idea who they’re fucking with and exactly how much they’re going to regret it.

“You said the words were threats, what exactly do they say?” I ask, plopping myself gracelessly down onto the couch. 

Ron waves his wand in the general direction of the kitchen and summons three bottles of beer from the fridge. He uncaps one for Hermione who grabs it with a grateful “thank you” and takes a long drink before she answers.

“Well, the one on my arm here tells me it’s better for everyone if Draco stays dead.” She pulls up the sleeve of her cardigan as she speaks, revealing words in a bold black font sitting neatly on her skin.

“The one on my thigh, though, that one’s about minding my place as a woman.” She takes another long drink. “Asks me if I know what happens to women who are too loud and don’t know when to shut up and insinuates it might happen to me too. I think the placement of that particular sentence gives me an excellent idea of exactly what it is it’s talking about.”

“That’s fucked up,” Ron says, in a strangled kind of voice. As he hands me my beer, I catch his eyes, briefly. Worry is written plainly on his face.

“A lot of things are fucked up when you’re a woman, Ron.” Hermione’s voice is brittle. “I am frustrated and angry and scared. I am a lot of things right now but you know what? Surprised is not one of them.”

“You think you’ve been targeted because you’re a woman?” I ask. The look Hermione shoots me makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut.

“No, Harry. I think I would have been targeted either way because the message about Draco, the one on my arm? That’s the important one. _That_ is the reason I’m being threatened. They want me to stop looking into Draco’s disappearance. But see, I think that if I had been a man, I would only have gotten that one. The one about minding my place, that one is about hurting me as a woman. It’s about making me feel scared, and violated, and intimidated.”

I squeeze her hand briefly. I feel guilty for making her spell it out for me, guilty that she’s shocked and shaken, yet she still has to do the work of explaining why she’s hurt.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m sorry I’ve spent so long without seeing all that awful stuff that seems so obvious to you. I’m sorry you had to explain all this to me. I’ll try to be better, I promise. I want to be better.”

She squeezes my hand back. I can tell from the look in her eyes she’s putting a reading list together for me in her head and I silently vow to read every article and every last book she gives me. I owe her this. Before I can tell her as much, Ron asks if he might cast a few diagnostic spells on the writing.

"My colleague Ermelinda already did when I first saw them. She’s pretty good at diagnostic spells too. She couldn’t find a magical signature. We couldn’t come up with a counter-spell either, as you can see.”

“So… Potion?” Ron asks.

Hermione nods and takes another drink from her beer.

“We couldn’t figure out which one, though. Couldn’t find any mention of a potion that does anything similar anywhere.”

I think of Draco in his potion lab. He would know, I think before I remember that I may never see him again. I clench my fingers around the cool, smooth glass of the beer bottle and I don’t say anything.

“I don’t want to say that’s good–because it’s not–but that limits the pool of suspects, doesn’t it?” Ron continues, paying me no mind. “Did you eat or drink anything that you hadn’t prepared yourself or that might have been laced with the potion?”

“I…” Hermione starts, then stops. “Well, I forgot to eat lunch. Theobalt from Ancient Manuscript finally found the time to bring me that 14th-century treatise on mind magic I requested a couple of months ago and I just couldn’t wait to open it. I nibbled a couple of biscuits from the packet I keep in my desk drawer—not while I was reading, of course, I have manners,” she adds with a pointed look at me. She always used to give us grief when we opened our school books at the dinner table and stained them with all manner of edible matter.

“I had tea from the tea trolley too,” she adds. “But everyone has tea from there. I don’t think whoever did this could have known exactly when I’d want a cup of tea and which cup I’d want to drink it from.”

“The biscuits might have been laced, though,” I interject. “They were in your desk. No one except you was going to help themselves to them. Do you keep your desk locked?”

Hermione shakes her head. “I usually lock the door to my office when I go, but plenty of people have keys that give them access to the entire floor.”

“We’ll need a full list,” Ron says. “But this is good, it really is. From there, we can narrow down who had both motive and opportunity and we can figure out who did this.”

He’s put his beer down in favour of a quill and a parchment and is taking notes. I can’t remember him ever being so keen on writing stuff down before. Has to be Hermione’s influence, I think and it makes me smile. They deserve each other, they really do.

“Potions and misogyny…” I say after a while, “do you think the same people responsible for this are also the people responsible for drugging Pansy?”

“I would bet on it,” Hermione says.

Ron raises an eyebrow.

“I’m not saying the world isn’t full of misogynist pricks. Believe me, I’m not. But we’ve established that whoever drugged me had both a despicable sense of moral and an impressive mastery of potions. And that’s exactly the kind of person who’s behind the potion Pansy’s dear father thought acceptable to drug her with.” Hermione sets down her beer on the side table and twists her hair up into a bun that she secures with her wand. She sighs, then adds, “Besides, do you really think it’s a coincidence that Harry followed a lead while investigating Pansy’s case and now there’s Draco all over his dreams? You know it has to all be linked!”

“We’ve just got to figure out how,” I say in a low voice, and Hermiones shoots me a small, relieved smile.

“And then, we’ve got to figure out how to teach the fuckers some basic human decency,” Ron concludes and sets the parchment and quill down.

I smile at both of them. We’ll be okay, the three of us. We’ll be okay. We’ve always been okay, haven’t we? We’ve lived through so much and made it through to the other side, and we’ll just do it once again. We’ll do it as many times as we need to.

* * *

I find myself, days later, irredeemably lost in some back alley of wizarding London with nothing but a glamour on my face and an address on a bit of parchment.

I couldn’t go to Saint Mungos, Ron insisted. Not until we knew what we were dealing with and who we were against. I was only too happy to agree. I didn’t particularly fancy my boss knowing that I spent my lunch hours in shady shops, drinking unknown potions made by suspects. But I still needed to get a proper check-up, and at some point in the discussion, Hermione said something about Theodore Nott. I remembered him from school, barely. Slytherin, friends with Draco. A bit of a wanker. He was different, now, she insisted. He was in a relationship with Lavender and ran an activist clinic for werewolves in a discreet part of town. He was a trained healer, and he wasn’t going to tell anyone about me. And he was my best choice, wasn’t he? My only choice, too. 

So here I am. In the pouring rain. All the doors look the same. No sign of a clinic at all. No sign there’s anything here but rows of cheap council flats and a few choice rats rummaging through the rubbish bins. I double-check the number on my parchment and I knock. A middle-aged witch answers. She looks nothing like a healer. She’s got bright blue hair and she’s wearing Doc Martens.

“I’m looking for Theodore Nott?” I say, despite the nagging feeling that I’ve gotten the wrong address. “Is this… Is this a clinic? Hermione Granger gave me this address.”

The witch does not smile at me. “Shh,” she hisses, a tattooed finger pressed over her blood-red lips. Then: “Come in”. She points me to a Muggle-looking plastic garden chair in the middle of the corridor. “Sit,” she orders before she leaves.

I sit. The corridor is clean, if bare, and dimly lit. There certainly aren’t any signs that someone is living here but I can hear several voices coming from another room. Before I can change my mind about being here, the witch appears again.

“He’ll see you now,” she says and motions for me to follow her. “I didn’t mean to be so curt with you,” she continues as we walk, “but we’ve had bad experiences in the past, not everyone’s keen on having a werewolf clinic down their street. Especially after the war... We like to be careful.”

Before I can assure her I understand, she stops in front of a door.

“There, go in. He’ll be waiting for you.”

Theodore is not at all the person I remember from school. He’s dressed in a healer robe that’s seen better days, his hair gathered in a messy bun at the back of his neck. He looks overworked and worried, not at all rich, or posh, or self-assured. For a reason I don’t quite understand, perhaps because he reminds me how much we’ve all changed since the end of the war, I instantly feel a little more at ease.

Still, when I drop the glamour, I have to push all the words through my teeth when I tell him about the dreams. I don’t want to leave anything out, in case it turns out to be important, so I make myself go through everything: the forest and the sea and the white lab, the way he looked at me, and the way he talked to me. The kisses. The sex, too. By the time I’m done, I feel nauseous and exhausted.

He listens carefully through all of it, tense and serious.

“We usually only treat werewolves here,” he says when I’m done pouring my heart out to him. “We don’t even have enough beds for all of them. We don’t have enough funds.”

He sighs, tired and weary. “But Draco was my friend,” he adds in a soft voice. “I miss him more than I can say.”

He turns around and straightens his instruments on the table behind me. I stay silent. I’ve said all there was to say and there are no words left now. When he speaks again, I hear grief in his voice.

“If there’s a chance at all that I can see him again, I’ll take it. And if there isn’t, at least I’ll have helped someone who cared about him.”

As I thank him, I promise myself that I will be making an anonymous donation to his clinic. A generous one.

* * *

Nott runs a full battery of tests. Then, he runs some more.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he concludes after a solid hour. He’s done countless spells, he’s taken my pulse, and my temperature, and a vial of my blood. “Everything is perfectly fine.”

I stare at him in disbelief.

“I keep having hallucinations of a dead man. Or a man who’s disappeared at the very least. I keep falling asleep on the floor and dreaming about the same thing over, and over again.”

“And yet, nothing shows up on the diagnostics.” He sounds tired, defeated. I realise he was hoping to find something too. I realise he was hoping he might see his friend again.

“There’s got to be something. I know they’re not normal dreams, Nott. I woke up with bruises from Draco’s fingers on my wrist. Normal dreams don’t do that, do they? There has to be something wrong, something you’ve missed. Something you’ve overlooked, something you’ve not tested for?”

Nott is silent for a little while and massages the bridge of his nose, standing in the makeshift examination room. I stare at the passé flowered wallpaper and try to think of what I could say to convince him to look again, to look harder.

“Maybe you need to be asleep,” he finally says. “Maybe if I could observe you as you dreamt, I might be able to understand it.”

He takes a sharp breath in.

“Do you think if we kept you here tonight, you might dream of him?”

* * *

The first thing Harry registers is the sound of loud sobs, echoing in the empty room. It is the wrong dream, he realises instantly, and it is the wrong boy too. The one that doesn’t call him Harry with a voice that sounds like the warm summer wind, the one that doesn’t hold him or kiss him or want him at all. But the wrong boy is huddled in a corner of the too-white room, and he’s crying, and it’s the only thing Harry can think about.

Every cell in his body wants to take the boy in his arms, wants to whisper his name and stroke his hair and tell him he loves him, oh he loves him like fishes love the sea, like the sun loves the sky. Loves him something awe-inspiring and fierce and larger than he ever thought possible.

But this is the wrong boy, and the wrong room, and the wrong dream.

“Hey,” he whispers instead.

“Potter,” Draco replies in a voice that sounds like granite or gravel, and Harry feels his dry-clay heart fissure behind his ribs.

 _You called me Harry,_ he wants to cry. _You called me love and gorgeous. Beautiful too._ He balls his hand into a fist until his fingers hurt, white-crushed at the joints. He bites his lip. He does not say anything.

Draco keeps on crying, sobs wracking his slender shoulders. Harry does not know what to do with himself, or about it, or at all, really.

“You’re not dead,” he finally says because he does not know what else he can tell Draco (because “I love you” and “You wanted me once” and “Could you still want me?” can never make it out of the cage of his teeth.)

Draco does not stop crying.

“You’re not dead, Draco.” Harry crouches down and grabs Draco’s shoulder. The linen shirt is soft under his finger and the flesh is firm underneath, and that’s when he remembers that it is warm and soft, remembers that it smells like leaves and smoke and fog.

“Can you hear me, Draco?” Harry asks in a futile attempt at dispelling the memory, his dry-twigs fingers stiff on Draco’s shoulder. “Listen, you’re not dead. You’re not dead.” (On Harry’s tongue, the words taste like grief all the same.)

“Might as well be,” Draco answers in a voice that sounds like someone cut him open and hollowed him out entirely (scooped out the heart of him, the blood of him, the lungs and the breath of him.) “It’s not living, is it? Being trapped here, alone.”

Harry exhales softly, sitting back on his heels and letting his fingers fall to his lap. They sit in silence on the too-cold floor for a while as they try to make sense of the sadness in their chests and of all the pin-cushion words in their throat.

“I’d try killing myself, you know,” Draco finally whispers, his legs drawn tightly against his chest, his face turned away from Harry and towards the floor, “if I wasn’t so afraid of the pain.” He lets out a small, mirthless laugh. “I guess I’ve always been too much of a coward for my own good, haven’t I?”

Harry does not mean to answer that it didn’t hurt when he died because he’s never told anyone about it and because it would be a stupid answer anyway, wouldn’t it? But it’s the only one he has, this stupid answer, it’s the only one that wouldn’t feel false or trite or useless, and so the words escape his mouth unbidden before he can even think about holding them back.

“I knew I’d see my mum, you know. And my dad. Sirius too,” he continues because the words have turned into a waterfall, now and because he’s been drowning in the ocean of that story since the war ended, “I knew I’d be reunited with every single person that ever loved me in the entire world. I knew I could decide to walk into their arms and never have to fight or hurt or bleed again.”

Draco’s hand is suddenly on his. Harry doesn’t stop talking.

“Instead, I decided to come back and found myself alone on a battlefield and every single cell in my body screamed for days. Instead, I came back and so many people died all the same and now I have to carry that grief everywhere I go and I have no idea how to do it. It was the right thing to do, I know, but I regret it, somedays.”

Fat tears roll down his chin and along the line of his jaw. He does not move. He barely breathes. In his hand, there is Draco’s, still and warm.

“I didn’t know you died,” Draco says softly.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” Harry replies. The words are fragile and quiet between them, now. Their voices careful, their bodies still. Neither dares to move or breathe or speak too loud, afraid that it might break the spell, this blissful island of calm and warmth among the infinite ocean of pain and grief that somehow became their lives. “I couldn’t, you know? It hurt too much, coming back. I couldn’t bear to even think about it. I couldn’t bear to think I got to come back when Remus and Tonks and Fred didn’t get the chance, not when I wasn’t sure I even wanted to live.”

They sit in silence after that, their hearts heavy and raw with secret but their bodies warmed and soothed by touch. 

“I’m happy you came back, you know,” Draco eventually whispers, “I’m happy you’re here. I’m happy it’s you who shows up here when I can’t bear being alone anymore.” There is a small silence, a sharp inhale. “I know it didn’t work out between us at Hogwarts,” Draco continues, his voice fragile and shaky, “and I don’t think I’ve ever told you that I was sorry about how it ended. It was an awful time, wasn’t it? We were so young and so afraid and in the middle of a war. It was so hard keeping it a secret even when our lives depended on it. But I really am—sorry, I mean. And I’m happy you didn’t choose to die.”

“I’m sorry too,” Harry replies, instead of telling him he understands him or forgives him or loves him because he’s been avoiding thinking about their failed relationship ever since it ended, because the memory of it still splits his chest into splintery halves, an ancient oak struck down by lightning.

Harry turns his head, slightly, and Draco’s face is inches away from his. _I could kiss him_ , Harry thinks. Draco’s eyelashes flutter shut, he lets out a small, shaky breath. They’re still holding hands, and Harry can barely remember how to breathe because if they can kiss in this dream, and if Draco isn’t really dead, perhaps there is hope after all. Hope that one day he can kiss Draco in the real world instead of in forests and by the sea and empty labs. Hope that if this version of Draco wants him too, kisses him too, perhaps so might the real version of Draco one day. Harry’s heart catches fire, bright and hot and hungry at the thought.

“Draco,” Harry whispers, but no sound comes out of his mouth. Around him, reality starts to bleed and dissolve, colours blurring into each other like a watercolour kaleidoscope.

“Wait,” he tries to plead. “No, no, no, no! Don’t make me go yet, let me stay here!”

Draco’s face is split open by loss and grief. 

“I love you,” he tries to yell, “I love you.” Draco does not hear him.

* * *

I gasp for air like a drowning man as I wake, clutching my sheet with both hands. Before I can register the dampness in my cheeks and the hoarseness in my throat, there is a loud sound in a corner of the room. I turn my head. Nott has just dropped his tray of supplies to the floor and is staring at me in shock.

I hear a frantic voice asking me if I’m okay. I know that voice, but grief and loss take up all the space in my brain and I can’t remember who it belongs to. A hand grabs my wrists and pulls me flush towards a warm body. Hermione, my mind supplies as my face is buried into dark curls.

“Mate, you gave us a right fright there.”

Ron’s there too, I realise. I can’t imagine why. They weren’t there when I fell asleep last night. Hermione’s still hugging me tightly. She’s sobbing. Ron looks like he hasn’t shaved in days.

“Wait… What happened?” I ask because I’m suddenly flooded with the nagging feeling that whatever happened, it is serious.

“You disappeared from your bed the instant you fell asleep,” Nott says as he waves his wand over me in a series of complicated diagnostic spells. “Completely gone. No trace of you. Not even a magical signature.”

“Oh, Harry, you’ve been missing for the past forty-eight hours and we were so worried!” Hermione hugs me tighter still and Ron places a comforting hand on her back.

In my veins, my blood turns cold with the unbearable certitude that everything is so much worse than I thought.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm etalice on tumblr! Come say hi!


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